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 looked in depth at the memory layout of a standard process in the Linux environment, and then the memory layout of a Rust program. We compared the memory management lifecycle in different programming languages and how Rust takes a different approach to memory management. We learned how memory is allocated, manipulated, and released in a Rust program, and looked at the rules governing memory management in Rust, including ownership and reference rules. We looked at the different types of memory safety issues and how Rust prevents them from using its ownership model, lifetimes, reference rules, and borrow checker.

We then returned to our template engine implementation example from Chapter03 and added a couple of features to the template engine. We achieved this by converting a static data structure into a dynamic data structure and learned how memory is allocated dynamically. Dynamic data structures are very useful in programs that deal with external inputs...