The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide - Rahul Sharma - E-Book

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide E-Book

Rahul sharma

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Beschreibung

Design and implement professional-level programs by leveraging modern data structures and algorithms in Rust


Key Features:


Improve your productivity by writing more simple and easy code in RustDiscover the functional and reactive implementations of traditional data structuresDelve into new domains of Rust, including WebAssembly, networking, and command-line tools


Book Description:


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 KaihlavirtaHands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust by Claus Matzinger


What you will learn:


Design and implement complex data structures in RustCreate and use well-tested and reusable components with RustUnderstand the basics of multithreaded programming and advanced algorithm designExplore application profiling based on benchmarking and testingStudy and apply best practices and strategies in error handlingCreate efficient web applications with the Actix-web frameworkUse Diesel for type-safe database interactions in your web application


Who this book is for:


If you are already familiar with an imperative language and now want to progress from being a beginner to an intermediate-level Rust programmer, this Learning Path is for you. Developers who are already familiar with Rust and want to delve deeper into the essential data structures and algorithms in Rust will also find this Learning Path useful.


Rahul Sharma is passionately curious about computer science and programming. A believer in Mozilla’s vision of an Open Web, Rahul currently works at AtherEnergy where he builds a resilient cloud infrastructure for smart scooters. His interests include systems programming, real-time web technologies, compilers, and type theory. He is also an occasional contributor to the Rust language. He also contributes and mentors interns on the Servo project by Mozilla. Vesa Kaihlavirta has been programming since he was five, beginning with C64 Basic. His main professional goal in life is to increase awareness of programming languages and software quality in all industries that use the software. He's an Arch Linux Developer Fellow and has been working in the telecom and financial industry for a decade. Claus Matzinger is a software engineer with a very diverse background. After working in a small company maintaining code for embedded devices, he joined a large corporation to work on legacy Smalltalk applications. This led to a great interest in programming languages early on, and Claus became the CTO for a health games start-up based on Scala technology. Since then, Claus' roles have shifted toward customer-facing roles in the IoT database-technology start-up crate.io and, most recently, Microsoft. There, he hosts a podcast, writes code together with customers, and blogs about the solutions arising from these engagements. For more than 5 years, Claus has implemented software to help customers innovate, achieve, and maintain success.

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The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Design, develop, and deploy effective software systems using the advanced constructs of Rust

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rahul Sharma
Vesa Kaihlavirta
Claus Matzinger

 

 

 

 

 

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

 

Copyright © 2019 Packt Publishing

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

 

First published: May 2019

 

Production reference: 1200519

 

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

 

ISBN 978-1-83882-810-3

 

www.packtpub.com

 
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Contributors

About the authors

Rahul Sharma is passionately curious about teaching programming. He has been writing software for the last two years. He got started with Rust with his work on Servo, a browser engine by Mozilla Research as part of his GSoC project. At present, he works at AtherEnergy, where he is building resilient cloud infrastructure for smart scooters. His interests include systems programming, distributed systems, compilers and type theory. He is also an occasional contributor to the Rust language and does mentoring of interns on the Servo project by Mozilla.

 

Vesa Kaihlavirta has been programming since he was five, beginning with C64 Basic. His main professional goal in life is to increase awareness of programming languages and software quality in all industries that use software. He's an Arch Linux Developer Fellow, and has been working in the telecom and financial industry for a decade. Vesa lives in Jyvaskyla, central Finland.

Claus Matzinger is a software engineer with a very diverse background. After working in a small company maintaining code for embedded devices, he joined a large corporation to work on legacy Smalltalk applications. This led to a great interest in programming languages early on, and Claus became the CTO for a health games start-up based on Scala technology. Since then, Claus' roles have shifted toward customer-facing roles in the IoT database technology start-up crate.io and, most recently, Microsoft. There, he hosts a podcast, writes code together with customers, and blogs about the solutions arising from these engagements. For more than 5 years, Claus has implemented software to help customers innovate, achieve, and maintain success.

Packt is searching for authors like you

If you're interested in becoming an author for Packt, please visit authors.packtpub.com and apply today. We have worked with thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help them share their insight with the global tech community. You can make a general application, apply for a specific hot topic that we are recruiting an author for, or submit your own idea.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

About Packt

Why subscribe?

Packt.com

Contributors

About the authors

Packt is searching for authors like you

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Download the example code files

Conventions used

Get in touch

Reviews

Getting Started with Rust

What is Rust and why should you care?

Installing the Rust compiler and toolchain

Using rustup.rs

A tour of the language

Primitive types

Declaring variables and immutability

Functions

Closures

Strings

Conditionals and decision making

Match expressions

Loops

User-defined types

Structs

Enums

Functions and methods on types

Impl blocks on structs

Impl blocks for enums

Modules, imports, and use statements

Collections

Arrays

Tuples

Vectors

Hashmaps

Slices

Iterators

Exercise – fixing the word counter

Summary

Managing Projects with Cargo

Package managers

Modules

Nested modules

File as a module

Directory as module

Cargo and crates

Creating a new Cargo project

Cargo and dependencies

Running tests with Cargo

Running examples with Cargo

Cargo workspace

Extending Cargo and tools

Subcommands and Cargo installation

cargo-watch

cargo-edit

cargo-deb

cargo-outdated

Linting code with clippy

Exploring the manifest file – Cargo.toml

Setting up a Rust development environment

Building a project with Cargo – imgtool

Summary

Tests, Documentation, and Benchmarks

Motivation for testing

Organizing tests

Testing primitives

Attributes

Assertion macros

Unit tests

First unit test

Running tests

Isolating test code

Failing tests

Ignoring tests

Integration tests

First integration test

Sharing common code

Documentation

Writing documentation

Generating and viewing documentation

Hosting documentation

Doc attributes

Documentation tests

Benchmarks

Built-in micro-benchmark harness

Benchmarking on stable Rust

Writing and testing a crate – logic gate simulator

Continuous integration with Travis CI

Summary

Types, Generics, and Traits

Type systems and why they matter

Generics

Creating generic types

Generic functions

Generic types

Generic implementations

Using generics

Abstracting behavior with traits

Traits

The many forms of traits

Marker traits

Simple traits

Generic traits

Associated type traits

Inherited traits

Using traits with generics – trait bounds

Trait bounds on types

Trait bounds on generic functions and impl blocks

Using + to compose traits as bounds

Trait bounds with impl trait syntax

Exploring standard library traits

True polymorphism using trait objects

Dispatch

Trait objects

Summary

Memory Management and Safety

Programs and memory

How do programs use memory?

Memory management and its kinds

Approaches to memory allocation

The stack

The heap

Memory management pitfalls

Memory safety

Trifecta of memory safety

Ownership

A brief on scopes

Move and copy semantics

Duplicating types via traits

Copy

Clone

Ownership in action

Borrowing

Borrowing rules

Borrowing in action

Method types based on borrowing

Lifetimes

Lifetime parameters

Lifetime elision and the rules

Lifetimes in user defined types

Lifetime in impl blocks

Multiple lifetimes

Lifetime subtyping

Specifying lifetime bounds on generic types

Pointer types in Rust

References – safe pointers

Raw pointers

Smart pointers

Drop

Deref and DerefMut

Types of smart pointers

Box<T>

Reference counted smart pointers

Rc<T>

Interior mutability

Cell<T>

RefCell<T>

Uses of interior mutability

Summary

Error Handling

Error handling prelude

Recoverable errors

Option

Result

Combinators on Option/Result

Common combinators

Using combinators

Converting between Option and Result

Early returns and the ? operator

Non-recoverable errors

User-friendly panics

Custom errors and the Error trait

Summary

Advanced Concepts

Type system tidbits

Blocks and expressions

Let statements

Loop as an expression

Type clarity and sign distinction in numeric types

Type inference

Type aliases

Strings

Owned strings – String

Borrowed strings – &str

Slicing and dicing strings

Using strings in functions

Joining strings

When to use &str versus String ?

Global values

Constants

Statics

Compile time functions – const fn

Dynamic statics using the lazy_static! macro

Iterators

Implementing a custom iterator

Advanced types

Unsized types

Function types

Never type ! and diverging functions

Unions

Cow

Advanced traits

Sized and ?Sized

Borrow and AsRef

ToOwned

From and Into

Trait objects and object safety

Universal function call syntax

Trait rules

Closures in depth

Fn closures

FnMut closures

FnOnce closures

Consts in structs, enums, and traits

Modules, paths, and imports

Imports

Re-exports

Selective privacy

Advanced match patterns and guards

Match guards

Advanced let destructure

Casting and coercion

Types and memory

Memory alignment

Exploring the std::mem module

Serialization and deserialization using serde

Summary

Concurrency

Program execution models

Concurrency

Approaches to concurrency

Kernel-based

User-level

Pitfalls

Concurrency in Rust

Thread basics

Customizing threads

Accessing data from threads

Concurrency models with threads

Shared state model

Shared ownership with Arc

Mutating shared data from threads

Mutex

Shared mutability with Arc and Mutex

RwLock

Communicating through message passing

Asynchronous channels

Synchronous channels

thread-safety in Rust

What is thread-safety?

Traits for thread-safety

Send

Sync

Concurrency using the actor model

Other crates

Summary

Metaprogramming with Macros

What is metaprogramming?

When to use and not use Rust macros

Macros in Rust and their types

Types of macros

Creating your first macro with macro_rules!

Built-in macros in the standard library

macro_rules! token types

Repetitions in macros

A more involved macro – writing a DSL for HashMap initialization

Macro use case – writing tests

Exercises

Procedural macros

Derive macros

Debugging macros

Useful procedural macro crates

Summary

Unsafe Rust and Foreign Function Interfaces

What is safe and unsafe really?

Unsafe functions and blocks

Unsafe traits and implementations

Calling C code from Rust

Calling Rust code from C

Using external C/C++ libraries from Rust

Creating native Python extensions with PyO3

Creating native extensions in Rust for Node.js

Summary

Logging

What is logging and why do we need it?

The need for logging frameworks

Logging frameworks and their key features

Approaches to logging

Unstructured logging

Structured logging

Logging in Rust

log – Rust's logging facade

The env_logger

log4rs

Structured logging using slog

Summary

Network Programming in Rust

Network programming prelude

Synchronous network I/O

Building a synchronous redis server

Asynchronous network I/O

Async abstractions in Rust

Mio

Futures

Tokio

Building an asynchronous redis server

Summary

Building Web Applications with Rust

Web applications in Rust

Typed HTTP with Hyper

Hyper server APIs – building a URL shortener 

hyper as a client – building a URL shortener client

Web frameworks

Actix-web basics

Building a bookmarks API using Actix-web

Summary

Lists, Lists, and More Lists

Linked lists

A transaction log

Adding entries

Log replay

After use

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Doubly linked list

A better transaction log

Examining the log

Reverse

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Skip lists

The best transaction log

The list

Adding data

Leveling up

Jumping around

Thoughts and discussion

Upsides

Downsides

Dynamic arrays

Favorite transactions

Internal arrays

Quick access

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Summary

Further reading

Robust Trees

Binary search tree

IoT device management

More devices

Finding the right one

Finding all devices

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Red-black tree

Better IoT device management

Even more devices

Balancing the tree

Finding the right one, now

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Heaps

A huge inbox

Getting messages in

Taking messages out

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Trie

More realistic IoT device management

Adding paths

Walking

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

B-Tree

An IoT database

Adding stuff

Searching for stuff

Walking the tree

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Graphs

The literal Internet of Things

Neighborhood search

The shortest path

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Summary

Exploring Maps and Sets

Hashing

Create your own

Message digestion

Wrap up

Maps

A location cache

The hash function

Adding locations

Fetching locations

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Sets

Storing network addresses

Networked operations

Union

Intersection

Difference

Wrap up

Upsides

Downsides

Summary

Further reading

Collections in Rust

Sequences

Vec<T> and VecDeque<T>

Architecture

Insert

Look up

Remove

LinkedList<T>

Architecture

Insert

Look up

Remove

Wrap up

Maps and sets

HashMap and HashSet

Architecture

Insert

Lookup

Remove

BTreeMap and BTreeSet

Architecture

Insert

Look up

Remove

Wrap up

Summary

Further reading

Algorithm Evaluation

The Big O notation

Other people's code

The Big O

Asymptotic runtime complexity

Making your own

Loops

Recursion

Complexity classes

O(1)

O(log(n))

O(n)

O(n log(n))

O(n²)

O(2n)

Comparison

In the wild

Data structures

Everyday things

Exotic things

Summary

Further reading

Ordering Things

From chaos to order

Bubble sort

Shell sort

Heap sort

Merge sort

Quicksort

Summary

Further reading

Finding Stuff

Finding the best

Linear searches

Jump search

Binary searching

Wrap up

Summary

Further reading

Random and Combinatorial

Pseudo-random numbers

LCG

Wichmann-Hill

The rand crate

Back to front

Packing bags or the 0-1 knapsack problem

N queens

Advanced problem solving

Dynamic programming

The knapsack problem improved

Metaheuristic approaches

Example metaheuristic – genetic algorithms

Summary

Further reading

Algorithms of the Standard Library

Slicing and iteration

Iterator

Slices

Search

Linear search

Binary search

Sorting

Stable sorting

Unstable sorting

Summary

Further reading

Other Books You May Enjoy

Leave a review - let other readers know what you think

Preface

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

Who this book is for

If you are already familiar with an imperative language and now want to progress from being a beginner to an intermediate-level Rust programmer, this Learning Path is for you. Developers who are already familiar with Rust and want to delve deeper into the essential data structures and algorithms in Rust will also find this Learning Path useful.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Rust, gives a brief history on Rust and the motivation behind its design, and covers basic language syntax. The chapter ends with an exercise covering all the language features.

Chapter 2, Managing Projects with Cargo, shows how Rust organizes large projects with its dedicated package manager. This serves as the basis for further chapters. It also covers editor integration with the Visual Studio Code editor.

Chapter 3, Tests, Documentation, and Benchmarks, explores the built-in testing harness, writing unit tests, integration tests, and how to write documentation in Rust. We also cover the benchmarking facilities of Rust code. Later, as a final exercise, we build a complete crate with documentation and tests.

Chapter 4, Types, Generics, and Traits, explores Rust's expressive type system and goes on to explain various ways of using the type system by building a complex number library.

Chapter 5, Memory Management and Safety, starts with the motivation for memory management and the various pitfalls in conventional low-level programming languages related to memory. It then moves toward explaining Rust's unique compile-time memory management ideas. We also explain various smart pointer types in Rust.

Chapter 6, Error Handling, starts with the motivation for error handling and explores different models of error handling in other languages. The chapter then examine Rust's error-handling strategy and types, before exploring handling errors in non-recoverable situations. The chapter ends with a library implementing custom error types.

Chapter 7, Advanced Concepts, explores some of the concepts already introduced in previous chapters, in more detail. It provides details on the underlying model of some of the type system abstractions provided by Rust.

Chapter 8, Concurrency, explores Rust's concurrency models and APIs in the standard libraries and teaches you how to build highly concurrent programs with no data races.

Chapter 9, Metaprogramming with Macros, examines how you can write code to generate code using the powerful and advanced macro construct of Rust, and outlines the language's declarative and procedural macros by building both types of macros.

Chapter 10, Unsafe Rust and Foreign Function Interfaces, explores the unsafe mode of Rust and the APIs on offer for interoperating Rust with other languages. The examples includes both calling into Rust from other languages, such as Python, Node.js, and C, as well as covering how Rust can be called from other languages.

Chapter 11, Logging, explains why logging is an important practice in software development, answering why we need logging frameworks, and exploring the crates on offer in the Rust ecosystem that can be used to help integrate logging into the application.

Chapter 12, Network Programming in Rust Sync, gives a brief introduction to network programming. After going through the basics, the chapter covers building a Redis server that can talk to the official Redis client. Lastly, the chapter explains how to use the standard library networking primitives and the Tokio and futures crates.

Chapter 13, Building Web Applications with Rust, starts by exploring the HTTP protocol and builds a simple URL shortener server using the hyper crate, followed by building a URL shortener client using the reqwest crate. In the end, we explore actix-web, a highperformance Async web application framework to build a bookmarks API server.

Chapter 14, Lists, Lists, and More Lists, covers the first data structures: lists. Using several examples, this chapter goes into variations of sequential data structures and their implementations.

Chapter 15, Robust Trees, continues our journey through popular data structures: trees are next on the list. In several detailed examples, we explore the inner workings of these efficient designs and how they improve application performance considerably.

Chapter 16, Exploring Maps and Sets, explores the most popular key-value stores: maps. In this chapter, techniques surrounding hash maps; hashing; and their close relative, the set; are described in detail.

Chapter 17, Collections in Rust, attempts to connect to the Rust programmer's daily life, going into the details of the Rust std::collections library, which contains the various data structures provided by the Rust standard library.

Chapter 18, Algorithm Evaluation, teaches you how to evaluate and compare algorithms.

Chapter 19, Ordering Things, will look at sorting values, an important task in programming—this chapter uncovers how that can be done quickly and safely.

Chapter 20, Finding Stuff, moves onto searching, which is especially important if there is no fundamental data structure to support it. In these cases, we use algorithms to be able to quickly find what we are looking for.

Chapter 21, Random and Combinatorial, is where we will see that, outside of sorting and searching, there are many problems that can be tackled algorithmically. This chapter is all about those: random number generation, backtracking, and improving computational complexities.

Chapter 22, Algorithms of the Standard Library, explores how the Rust standard library does things when it comes to everyday algorithmic tasks such as sorting and searching.

To get the most out of this book

To really grasp the content of this book, it is recommended that you write out the example code and try fiddling with code to get familiar with the Rust's error messages, so they can guide you toward writing correct programs. You can either use Linux or Windows OS.

Here are a few recommendations for text editors and other tools:

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (

https://code.visualstudio.com/

), arguably one of the best Rust code editors

Rust support for Visual Studio Code via a plugin (

https://github.com/rust-lang/rls-vscode

)

Rust Language Server (RLS), found at

https://github.com/rust-lang/rls-vscode

, installed via rustup (

https://rustup.rs/

)

Debugging support using the LLDB frontend plugin (

https://github.com/vadimcn/vscode-lldb

) for Visual Studio Code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packt.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

Log in or register at

www.packt.com

.

Select the

SUPPORT

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Click on

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Enter the name of the book in the

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box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows

Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac

7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Complete-Rust-Programming-Reference-Guide. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "However, it makes the whole thing safe—thanks toRefCells checking borrowing rules at runtime."

A block of code is set as follows:

struct Node {value: i32,next: Option<Node>}

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel"

Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, mention the book title in the subject of your message and email us at [email protected].

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packt.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.

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If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Reviews

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For more information about Packt, please visit packt.com.

Getting Started with Rust

Learning a new language is like building a house – the foundation needs to be strong. With a language that changes the way you think and reason about your code, there's always more effort involved in the beginning, and it's important to be aware of that. The end result, however, is that you get to shift your thinking with these new-found concepts and tools.

This chapter will give you a whirlwind tour on the design philosophy of Rust, an overview of its syntax and the type system. We assume that you have a basic knowledge of mainstream languages such as C, C++, or Python, and the ideas that surround object-oriented programming. Each section will contain example code, along with an explanation of it. There will be ample code examples and output from the compiler, that will help you become familiar with the language. We'll also delve into a brief history of the language and how it continues to evolve.

Getting familiar with a new language requires perseverance, patience, and practice. I highly recommend to all readers that you manually write and don't copy/paste the code examples listed here. The best part of writing and fiddling with Rust code is the precise and helpful error messages you get from the compiler, which the Rust community often likes to call error-driven development. We'll see these errors frequently throughout this book to understand how the compiler thinks of our code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

What is Rust and why should you care?

Installing the Rust compiler and the toolchain

A brief tour of the language and its syntax

A final exercise, where we'll put what we've learned together

Installing the Rust compiler and toolchain

The Rust toolchain has two major components: the compiler, rustc, and the package manager, cargo, which helps manage Rust projects. The toolchain comes in three release channels:

Nightly

: The daily successful build from the master development branch. This contains all the latest features, many of which are unstable.

Beta

: This is released every six weeks. A new beta branch is taken from nightly. It contains only features that are flagged as stable.

Stable

: This is released every six weeks. The previous beta branch becomes the new stable release.

Developers are encouraged to use the stable release channel. However, the nightly version enables bleeding edge features, and some libraries and programs require it. You can change to the nightly toolchain easily with rustup. We'll see how we can do that in a moment.

Using rustup.rs

Rustup is a tool to that installs the Rust compiler on all supported platforms. To make it easier for developers on different platforms to download and use the language, the Rust team developed rustup. It's a command-line tool written in Rust that provides an easy way to install pre-built binaries of the compiler and binary builds of the standard library for cross compiling needs. It can also install other components, such as the Rust source code, documentation, Rust formatting tool (rustfmt), Rust Language Server (RLS for IDEs), and other developer tools, and it runs on all platforms, including Windows.

From their official page at https://rustup.rs, the recommended way to install the toolchain is to run the following command:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

By default, the installer installs the stable version of the Rust compiler, its package manager, Cargo, and the language's standard library documentation so that it can be viewed offline. These are installed by default under the ~/.cargo directory. Rustup also updates your PATH environment variable to point to this directory.

The following is a screenshot of running the preceding command on Ubuntu 16.04:

If you need to make any changes to your installation, choose 2. However, the defaults are fine for us, so we'll go ahead and choose 1. Here's the output after the installation:

 

Rustup also has other capabilities, such as updating the toolchain to the latest version, which can be done by running rustup update. It can also update itself via rustup self update. It also provides directory-specific toolchain configuration. The default toolchain is set globally to whatever toolchain gets installed, which in most cases is the stable toolchain. You can view the default one by invoking rustup show. If you want to use the latest nightly toolchain for one of your projects, you can tell rustup to switch to nightly for that particular directory by running rustup override set nightly. If, for some reason, someone wants to use an older version of the toolchain or downgrade (say, the nightly build on 2016-06-03), rustup can also download that if we were to run rustup install nightly-2016-06-03, followed by setting the same using the override sub-command. More information on rustup can be found at https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustup.rs.

Note: All of the code examples and projects in this book are based on compiler version rustc 1.32.0 (9fda7c223 2019-01-16).

Now, you should have everything you need to compile and run programs written in Rust. Let's get Rusty!

Primitive types

Rust has the following built-in primitive types:

bool

: These are the usual booleans and can be either

true

or

false

.

char

: Characters, such as 

e

.

Integer types: These are characterized by the bit width. Rust supports integers that are up to 128 bits wide:

 

signed

unsigned

i8

u8

i16

u16

i32

u32

i64

u64

i128

u128

isize

: The pointer-sized signed integer type. Equivalent to

i32

on 32-bit CPU and

i64

on 64-bit CPU.

usize

: The pointer-sized unsigned integer type. Equivalent to

i32

on 32-bit CPU and

i64

on 64-bit CPU.

f32

: The 32-bit floating point type. Implements the IEEE 754 standard for floating point representation.

f64

: The 64-bit floating point type.

[T; N]

: A fixed-size array, for the element type,

T

, and the non-negative compile-time constant size N.

[T]

: A dynamically-sized view into a contiguous sequence, for any type

T

.

str

: String slices, mainly used as a reference, that is,

&str

.

(T, U, ..)

: A finite sequence, (T, U, ..) where T and U can be different types.

fn(i32) -> i32

: A function that takes an 

i32

and returns an

i32

. Functions also have a type.