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 reviewed the overall structure of the Rust Standard Library and classified the modules of the standard library into different categories for better understanding. You got a brief introduction to the modules in areas of concurrency, memory management, file system operations, data processing, data types, error handling, compiler-related, FFI, networking, I/O, OS-specific, and time-related features.

We looked at what a template engine is, how it works, and defined the scope and requirements of our project. We designed the template engine in terms of Rust data structures (enum and struct) and Rust functions. We saw how to write code for parsing templates and to generate HTML for statements involving template variables. We executed the program providing input data and verified the generated HTML in the terminal (command line).

In the next chapter, we will take a closer look at the Rust Standard Library modules that deal with managing process environment...