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Mastering Rust

You're reading from   Mastering Rust Learn about memory safety, type system, concurrency, and the new features of Rust 2018 edition

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789346572
Length 554 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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Vesa Kaihlavirta Vesa Kaihlavirta
Author Profile Icon Vesa Kaihlavirta
Vesa Kaihlavirta
Rahul Sharma Rahul Sharma
Author Profile Icon Rahul Sharma
Rahul Sharma
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Toc

Table of Contents (19) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started with Rust FREE CHAPTER 2. Managing Projects with Cargo 3. Tests, Documentation, and Benchmarks 4. Types, Generics, and Traits 5. Memory Management and Safety 6. Error Handling 7. Advanced Concepts 8. Concurrency 9. Metaprogramming with Macros 10. Unsafe Rust and Foreign Function Interfaces 11. Logging 12. Network Programming in Rust 13. Building Web Applications with Rust 14. Interacting with Databases in Rust 15. Rust on the Web with WebAssembly 16. Building Desktop Applications with Rust 17. Debugging 18. Other Books You May Enjoy

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the metaprogramming abilities of Rust and looked at many kinds of macros. The most frequently used macro is macro_rules!, which is a declarative macro. Declarative macros work at the abstract syntax tree level, which means that they do not support arbitrary expansions, but require that the macro expansions are well-formed in the AST. For more complex use cases, you can use procedural macros where you get complete control of manipulating the input and generating the desired code. We also looked at ways to debug macros using the cargo subcommand cargo-expand.

Macros are indeed a powerful tool, but not something that should be used heavily. Only when the more usual mechanisms of abstraction such as functions, traits, and generics do not suffice for the problem at hand should we turn to macros. Also, macros make the code less readable for newcomers...

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