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Rust in a Nutshell
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rust_nutshell.md

Rust in a Nutshell

Table of Contents

Rust: The Language

Features:

  • Compiled to machine code
  • Strong, static typing
  • Imperative, with functional aspects
  • Can do both high-level and low-level programming
  • No garbage collection or runtime
  • Control allocation
  • Safe (e.g. no null pointers, correct concurrency...)
  • Cross-compilation (WebAssembly!)
  • Works with traditional tools (e.g. perf, gdb, valgrind...)
  • Modern type system
  • Long-term viability: Mozilla, Dropbox, CloudFlare, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Atlassian, npm

Drawbacks:

  • Learning curve: borrow checker
  • Ecosystem: still growing
  • Compile times are great compared to Haskell, but still slow compared to Go, C.
  • Vendor support (e.g. CUDA sdk, NVIDIA sdk), no C++ integration.
  • Windows ? Linux and MacOS mainly

Borrow Checker

Macros

  • Declarative macros e.g. vec!
  • Procedural macros e.g. #[derive(MyTrait)]
  • Example

Resources:

Parallelism & Concurrency

Example

Transaction Engine

Dependency injection

A common practice is to use traits and parametric structs.

Use mockall for testing.

Functional Programming in Rust

  • Algebraic Data Types + patterns
  • Efficient Generics (monomorphization)
  • Higher-order functions
  • Iterators
  • Option(Maybe) and Result(Either)
  • No Monads, but we have ?
  • sequence and traverse

Not recommended:

Low-level Programming in Rust

Rust is sold (or was sold) as an embedded programming language.

FFI with C

Lots of tools:

See example

Cross-compilation

Rust can cross-compile to a big number of platforms: x86, arm, mips, powerpc, risc-v... with just cargo build --target=x86_64-apple-darwin

Project Structure

Ecosystem

  • rustc
  • cargo
  • rustfmt
  • clippy

Rustup

rustup

  • Any toolchain(channel + version), any target(cross-compilation), any component(clippy, lsp)!
  • rustup run stable rustc --version (or rustc +stable --version)
  • rustup default nightly
  • rustup component add rust-docs

IDE support

  • rust-analyzer: rustup +nightly component add rust-analyzer-preview
  • Vscode, vim/neovim, emacs, etc.

Documentation

Libraries

How to pick a library

Example: picking an HTTP Server

Candidates:

Community

Good practices

Learning Rust

Start with The Rust Book and see the other resources below.

More resources

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