Rust is a new systems programming language that combines the performance and low-level control of C and C++ with memory safety and thread safety. Rust's modern, flexible types ensure your program is free of null pointer dereferences, double frees, dangling pointers, and similar bugs, all at compile time, without runtime overhead. In multi-threaded code, Rust catches data races at compile time, making concurrency much easier to use., Written by two experienced systems programmers, this book explains how Rust manages to bridge the gap between performance and safety, and how you can take advantage of it. Topics include: How Rust represents values in memory (with diagrams) Complete explanations of ownership, moves, borrows, and lifetimes Cargo, rustdoc, unit tests, and how to publish your code on crates.io, Rust's public package repository High-level features like generic code, closures, collections, and iterators that make Rust productive and flexible Concurrency in Rust: threads, mutexes, channels, and atomics, all much safer to use than in C or C++ Unsafe code, and how to preserve the integrity of ordinary code that uses it Extended examples illustrating how pieces of the language fit together
This practical book introduces systems programmers to Rust, the new and cutting-edge language that’s still in the experimental/lab stage. You’ll learn how Rust offers the rare and valuable combination of statically verified memory safety and low-level control—imagine C++, but without dangling pointers, null pointer dereferences, leaks, or buffer overruns.
Author Jim Blandy—the maintainer of GNU Emacs and GNU Guile—demonstrates how Rust has the potential to be the first usable programming language that brings the benefits of an expressive modern type system to systems programming. Rust’s rules for borrowing, mutability, ownership, and moves versus copies will be unfamiliar to most systems programmers, but they’re key to Rust’s unique advantages.
This book presents Rust’s rules clearly and economically; elaborates on their consequences; and shows you how to express the programs you want to write in terms that Rust can prove are free of a broad class of common errors.