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

Doing file I/O in Rust

In this section, we will look at the Rust method calls that let us work with files in Rust programs. The Rust Standard Library spares the programmer from having to work with system calls directly and provides a set of wrapper methods exposing APIs for common file operations.

The primary module in the Rust Standard Library for working with files is std::fs. The official documentation for std::fs can be found here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/fs/index.html. This documentation provides the set of methods, structs, enums, and traits that collectively provide features for working with files. It helps to study the structure of the std::fs module to gain a deeper understanding. However, for those starting out with exploring system programming in Rust, it is more useful to begin with a mental model of what kinds of things a programmer would like to do with files, and map it back to the Rust Standard Library. This is what we will do in this section. The common lifecycle...