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

Working with the terminal UI (size, color, styles) and cursors

In this section, we will build the first iteration of the text viewer. At the end of this section, we will have a program that will accept a filename from the command line, display its contents, and display a header and footer bar. We will use a Termion crate to set the color and style, get the terminal size, position the cursor at specific coordinates, and clear the screen.

The code in this section is organized as follows:

  • Writing data structures and the main() function
  • Initializing the text viewer and getting the terminal size
  • Displaying a document and styling the terminal color, styles, and cursor position
  • Exiting the text viewer

Let's start with data structures and the main() function of the text viewer

Writing data structures and the main() function

In this section, we'll define the data structures needed to represent the text viewer in memory. We'll also write the...