Rust Essentials: A quick guide to writing fast, safe, and concurrent systems and applications

Key FeaturesGet started with Rust to build scalable and high performance applicationsEnhance your application development skills using the power of RustDiscover the power of Rust when developing concurrent applications for large and scalable softwareBook DescriptionRust is the new, open source, fast, and safe systems programming language for the 21st century, developed at Mozilla Research, and with a steadily growing community. It was created to solve the dilemma between high-level, slow code with minimal control over the system, and low-level, fast code with maximum system control. It is no longer necessary to learn C/C++ to develop resource intensive and low-level systems applications. This book will give you a head start to solve systems programming and application tasks with Rust.We start off with an argumentation of Rust's unique place in today's landscape of programming languages. You'll install Rust and learn how to work with its package manager Cargo. The various concepts are introduced step by step: variables, types, functions, and control structures to lay the groundwork. Then we explore more structured data such as strings, arrays, and enums, and you’ll see how pattern matching works.Throughout all this, we stress the unique ways of reasoning that the Rust compiler uses to produce safe code. Next we look at Rust's specific way of error handling, and the overall importance of traits in Rust code. The pillar of memory safety is treated in depth as we explore the various pointer kinds. Next, you’ll see how macros can simplify code generation, and how to compose bigger projects with modules and crates. Finally, you’ll discover how we can write safe concurrent code in Rust and interface with C programs, get a view of the Rust ecosystem, and explore the use of the standard library.What you will learnSet up your Rust environment to achieve the highest productivityBridge the performance gap between safe and unsafe languagesUse pattern matching to create flexible codeApply generics and traits to develop widely applicable codeOrganize your code in modules and cratesBuild macros to extend Rust’s capabilities and reachApply tasks to tackle problems concurrently in a distributed environmentAbout the AuthorIvo Balbaert is currently a lecturer in (web) programming and databases at CVO Antwerpen, a community college in Belgium. He received a PhD in applied physics from University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20 years in the software industry as a developer and consultant in several companies and for 10 years as project manager at the University Hospital of Antwerp. From 2000 onward, he switched to partly teaching, developing software, and writing technical books.Table of ContentsSTARTING WITH RUSTUSING VARIABLES AND TYPESUSING FUNCTIONS AND CONTROL STRUCTURESSTRUCTURING DATA AND MATCHING PATTERNSHIGHER-ORDER FUNCTIONS AND ERROR HANDLINGUsing traits and OOP in RustPOINTERS AND MEMORY SAFETYORGANIZING CODE AND MACROSCONCURRENCY AND PARALLELISMPROGRAMMING AT THE BOUNDARIESExploring the standard libraryThe ecosystem of crates