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 learned the basics of terminal management by writing a mini text viewer. We learned how to use the Termion library to get the terminal size, set the foreground and background colors, and set styles. After this, we learned how to work with cursors on the terminal, including clearing the screen, positioning the cursor at a particular set of coordinates, and keeping track of the current cursor position.

We learned how to listen to user inputs and track the keyboard arrow keys for scrolling operations, including left, right, up, and down. We wrote code to display document contents dynamically as the user scrolls through it, keeping the constraints of the terminal size in mind. As an exercise, you can refine the text viewer, and also add functionality to convert the text viewer into a full-fledged editor.

Learning these features is important to write applications such as terminal-based games, editing and viewing applications and terminal graphical interfaces...