Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger
Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust is a powerful language with a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. This Learning Path is filled with clear and simple explanations of its features along with real-world examples, demonstrating how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. You’ll get started with an introduction to Rust data structures, algorithms, and essential language constructs. Next, you will understand how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You’ll also learn to implement sorting and searching algorithms, such as Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. As you progress, you’ll pick up on using Rust for systems programming, network programming, and the web. You’ll then move on to discover a variety of techniques, right from writing memory-safe code, to building idiomatic Rust libraries, and even advanced macros. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be able to implement Rust for enterprise projects, writing better tests and documentation, designing for performance, and creating idiomatic Rust code. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Mastering Rust - Second Edition by Rahul Sharma and Vesa Kaihlavirta • Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust by Claus Matzinger
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 14. Lists, Lists, and More Lists

Lists are everywhere: shopping lists, to-do lists, recipes, street numbers in western countries... simply everywhere. Their defining characteristic, storing things in a linear, defined relationship with each other, helps us keep track of stuff and find it again later on. From a data structure perspective, they are also essential to almost any program and come in various shapes and forms. While some lists are tricky to implement in Rust, the general principles can be found here as well, along with some valuable lessons on the borrow checker! After this chapter, we want you to know more about the following:

  • (Doubly) linked lists and when you should use them
  • Array lists, better known as Rust's vector
  • Skip lists and, ideally, the New York metro subway system
  • Implementing a simple transaction log

Note

As a final note, this chapter will build safe implementations of various lists, even though unsafe versions could be faster and require less code. This decision...