Book Image

Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

By : Prabhu Eshwarla
Book Image

Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

By: Prabhu Eshwarla

Overview of this book

Modern programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java have become increasingly accepted for application-level programming, but for systems programming, C and C++ are predominantly used due to the need for low-level control of system resources. Rust promises the best of both worlds: the type safety of Java, and the speed and expressiveness of C++, while also including memory safety without a garbage collector. This book is a comprehensive introduction if you’re new to Rust and systems programming and are looking to build reliable and efficient systems software without C or C++. The book takes a unique approach by starting each topic with Linux kernel concepts and APIs relevant to that topic. You’ll also explore how system resources can be controlled from Rust. As you progress, you’ll delve into advanced topics. You’ll cover network programming, focusing on aspects such as working with low-level network primitives and protocols in Rust, before going on to learn how to use and compile Rust with WebAssembly. Later chapters will take you through practical code examples and projects to help you build on your knowledge. By the end of this Rust programming book, you will be equipped with practical skills to write systems software tools, libraries, and utilities in Rust.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with System Programming in Rust
6
Section 2: Managing and Controlling System Resources in Rust
12
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Technical requirements

Verify that rustup, rustc, and cargo have been installed correctly with the following command:

rustup --version
rustc --version 
cargo --version

Since this chapter involves compiling C code and generating a binary, you will need to set up the C development environment on your development machine. After setup, run the following command to verify that the installation is successful:

gcc --version

If this command does not execute successfully, please revisit your installation.

Note

It is recommended that those developing on a Windows platform use a Linux virtual machine to try out the code in this chapter.

The code in this section has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64 and should work on any other Linux variant.

The Git repo for the code in this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Practical-System-Programming-for-Rust-Developers/tree/master/Chapter12.