The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide: Design, develop, and deploy effective software systems using the advanced constructs of Rust

685 Pages·2019·11.165 MB·English

by  Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger

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
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First published: May 2019
Production reference: 1200519
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ISBN 978-1-83882-810-3
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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.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Rust 7
What is Rust and why should you care? 8
Installing the Rust compiler and toolchain 15
Using rustup.rs 15
A tour of the language 18
Primitive types 21
Declaring variables and immutability 22
Functions 23
Closures 25
Strings 26
Conditionals and decision making 27
Match expressions 29
Loops 30
User-defined types 32
Structs 33
Enums 35
Functions and methods on types 37
Impl blocks on structs 38
Impl blocks for enums 40
Modules, imports, and use statements 42
Collections 42
Arrays 43
Tuples 43
Vectors 44
Hashmaps 44
Slices 45
Iterators 47
Exercise – fixing the word counter 48
Summary 49
Chapter 2: Managing Projects with Cargo 50
Package managers 51
Modules 51
Nested modules 52
File as a module 54
Directory as module 55
Cargo and crates 57
Creating a new Cargo project 59
Cargo and dependencies 61
Table of Contents
Running tests with Cargo 63
Running examples with Cargo 66
Cargo workspace 66
Extending Cargo and tools 68
Subcommands and Cargo installation 68
cargo-watch 68
cargo-edit 69
cargo-deb 69
cargo-outdated 70
Linting code with clippy 70
Exploring the manifest file – Cargo.toml 71
Setting up a Rust development environment 74
Building a project with Cargo – imgtool 78
Summary 81
Chapter 3: Tests, Documentation, and Benchmarks 82
Motivation for testing 83
Organizing tests 84
Testing primitives 84
Attributes 85
Assertion macros 86
Unit tests 87
First unit test 87
Running tests 88
Isolating test code 88
Failing tests 90
Ignoring tests 90
Integration tests 91
First integration test 92
Sharing common code 93
Documentation 95
Writing documentation 95
Generating and viewing documentation 96
Hosting documentation 96
Doc attributes 97
Documentation tests 98
Benchmarks 99
Built-in micro-benchmark harness 100
Benchmarking on stable Rust 102
Writing and testing a crate – logic gate simulator 105
Continuous integration with Travis CI 109
Summary 113
Chapter 4: Types, Generics, and Traits 114
Type systems and why they matter 114
Generics 116
[ ii ]
Table of Contents
Creating generic types 117
Generic functions 118
Generic types 119
Generic implementations 119
Using generics 121
Abstracting behavior with traits 123
Traits 124
The many forms of traits 130
Marker traits 130
Simple traits 131
Generic traits 131
Associated type traits 131
Inherited traits 132
Using traits with generics – trait bounds 132
Trait bounds on types 136
Trait bounds on generic functions and impl blocks 137
Using + to compose traits as bounds 138
Trait bounds with impl trait syntax 139
Exploring standard library traits 141
True polymorphism using trait objects 148
Dispatch 148
Trait objects 149
Summary 151
Chapter 5: Memory Management and Safety 152
Programs and memory 153
How do programs use memory? 155
Memory management and its kinds 156
Approaches to memory allocation 157
The stack 157
The heap 159
Memory management pitfalls 161
Memory safety 161
Trifecta of memory safety 164
Ownership 164
A brief on scopes 166
Move and copy semantics 168
Duplicating types via traits 169
Copy 170
Clone 170
Ownership in action 172
Borrowing 177
Borrowing rules 179
Borrowing in action 180
Method types based on borrowing 182
Lifetimes 183
[ iii ]
Table of Contents
Lifetime parameters 184
Lifetime elision and the rules 185
Lifetimes in user defined types 187
Lifetime in impl blocks 187
Multiple lifetimes 188
Lifetime subtyping 188
Specifying lifetime bounds on generic types 189
Pointer types in Rust 191
References – safe pointers 192
Raw pointers 192
Smart pointers 193
Drop 193
Deref and DerefMut 195
Types of smart pointers 195
Box<T> 196
Reference counted smart pointers 198
Rc<T> 199
Interior mutability 204
Cell<T> 204
RefCell<T> 206
Uses of interior mutability 207
Summary 209
Chapter 6: Error Handling 210
Error handling prelude 210
Recoverable errors 213
Option 213
Result 217
Combinators on Option/Result 221
Common combinators 222
Using combinators 223
Converting between Option and Result 225
Early returns and the ? operator 225
Non-recoverable errors 227
User-friendly panics 231
Custom errors and the Error trait 231
Summary 236
Chapter 7: Advanced Concepts 237
Type system tidbits 237
Blocks and expressions 238
Let statements 241
Loop as an expression 246
Type clarity and sign distinction in numeric types 247
Type inference 249
Type aliases 251
Strings 252
[ iv ]