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

Summary

In this chapter, we built a command-line application from scratch in Rust, without using any third-party libraries, to compute the value of the arithmetic expressions. We covered many basic concepts in Rust, including data types, how to model and design an application domain with Rust data structures, how to split code across modules and integrate them, how to structure code within a module as functions, how to expose module functions to other modules, how to do pattern matching for elegant and safe code, how to add functionality to structs and enums, how to implement traits and annotate lifetimes, how to design and propagate custom error types, how to box types to make data sizes predictable for the compiler, how to construct a recursive node tree and navigate it, how to write code that recursively evaluates an expression, and how to specify lifetime parameters for structs.

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