Programming Rust

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 broad classes of everyday errors.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Why Rust?
Chapter 2. A Tour of Rust
Chapter 3. Basic Types
Chapter 4. Ownership
Chapter 5. References
Chapter 6. Expressions
Chapter 7. Error Handling
Chapter 8. Crates and Modules
Chapter 9. Structs
Chapter 10. Enums and Patterns
Chapter 11. Traits and Generics
Chapter 12. Operator Overloading
Chapter 13. Utility Traits
Chapter 14. Closures
Chapter 15. Iterators
Chapter 16. Collections
Chapter 17. Strings and Text
Chapter 18. Input and Output
Chapter 19. Concurrency
Chapter 20. Macros
Chapter 21. Unsafe Code