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

Building a template engine

In this section, we will look at the design of an HTML template engine and implement one of the features using the Rust Standard Library. Let's first understand what a template engine is.

Applications such as web and mobile apps use structured data stored in datastores such as relational databases, NoSQL databases, and key-value stores. However, there is a lot of data on the web that is unstructured. One particular example is text data that all web pages contain. Web pages are generated as HTML files that have a text-based format.

On observing closely, we can see that an HTML page has two parts: static text literals and dynamic parts. The HTML page is authored as a template with the static and dynamic parts, and the context for HTML generation comes from a data source. While generating a web page, the generator should take the static text and output it without change, while it should combine some processing and the supplied context to generate...