Rust Programming Cookbook: Explore the latest features of Rust 2018 for building fast and secure apps

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Starting Off with Rust

The Rust ecosystem has grown considerably over the last year, and the 2018 edition, in particular, brought a significant push toward stabilization. The tooling is developing and important libraries are maturing to a point where many bigger companies use Rust in production.

One of the features of Rust is a steep learning curve—which is mostly due to a fundamental change in how to think about memory allocation. It is not uncommon for experienced programmers in other languages (such as C#) to feel overwhelmed with the way things are done in Rust. In this chapter, we will try to overcome this and lower the bar to get started!

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

Getting everything ready
Working with the command line I/O
Creating and using data types
Controlling execution flow
Splitting your code with crates and modules
Writing tests and benchmarks
Documenting your code
Testing your documentation
Sharing code among types
Sequence types in Rust
Debugging Rust

Setting up your environment

Since the programming language comes with a variety of toolchains, tools, linkers, and compiler versions, choosing the best-fitting variation is not easy. Additionally, Rust works on all major operating systems—which adds another variable.

However, installing Rust has become a trivial task when using rustup (https://rustup.rs/). On the website, a helpful script (or installer on Windows) that takes care of retrieving and installing the required components can be downloaded. The same tool lets you switch between and update (and uninstall) these components as well. This is the recommended way.

Choosing to use the Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler (MSVC) together with Rust requires that you install additional software such as the Visual C++ runtime and compiler tools.

To write code, an editor is also required. Since Visual Studio Code sports some Rust parts, it is a great choice together with the Rust extension. It's an open source editor developed by Microsoft and is well received across the world and the Rust community. In this recipe, we will install the following components:

Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/)
rustup (https://rustup.rs)
rustc (and the rest of the compiler toolchains)
cargo
RLS (short for Rust Language Server—this is for autocompletion)
Rust language support for Visual Studio Code

Getting ready

On a computer running either macOS, Linux, or Windows, only a web browser and internet connection are required. Bear in mind that the Windows installation works a little bit different from the *nix systems (Linux and macOS), which use scripts.

How to do it...

Each of the parts requires us to navigate to their respective websites, download the installer, and follow their instructions:

Open the browser and navigate to https://rustup.rs and https://code.visualstudio.com/.
Choose the installers fit for your operating system.
After downloading, run the installers and follow their instructions, choosing the stable branches.
Once successfully installed, we'll go deeper into each installation.

Now, let's go behind the scenes to understand the installation better

Managing the Rust installation with rustup.rs

To test whether the installation of the Rust toolchain with rustup was successful, the rustc command is available to run in Terminal (or PowerShell on Windows):

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.33.0 (2aa4c46cf 2019-02-28)

Note that you will have a later version when you are running this. It doesn't matter if you stick to the 2018 edition for your code.

Rust requires a native linker to be available on your system. On Linux or Unix systems (such as macOS), Rust calls cc for linking, whereas on Windows, the linker of choice is Microsoft Visual Studio's linker, which depends on having Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools installed. While it's possible to use an open source toolchain on Windows as well, this exercise is left for more advanced users.

Even with the 2018 edition, some useful features are still only available on nightly. To install the nightly edition of rustc, perform these steps:

Run rustup install nightly (use nightly-msvc on Windows if you are not using the GNU toolchain) in a Terminal or PowerShell window.
After the command finishes, the default toolchain (used in cargo) can be switched using rustup default nightly.

Installing Visual Studio Code and extensions

In its vanilla version, Visual Studio Code comes with syntax highlighting for many languages. However, for autocompletion or/and checking syntax, an extension is required. The Rust project supplies this extension:

Open Visual Studio Code.
Use Ctrl + P (cmd + P on macOS) to open the command-line interface, then type ext install rust-lang.rust to install the extension. The process should look like this:

The extension uses RLS to do static code analysis and provide completion and syntax checking. The extension should install the RLS component automatically, but sometimes it will fail to do this. One solution is to add the following configuration to Visual Studio Code's settings.json file (use Ctrl + P/cmd + P to find it):

{
    "rust-client.channel":"stable"
}

Alternatively, rustup will also install RLS with the rustup component add rls command.

Troubleshooting

Occasionally, updating the tools will lead to errors that files are missing or cannot be overwritten. This can be for a wide range of reasons, but a full reset of the installations can help. On Linux or macOS systems, the following command takes care of deleting anything rustup installed:

$ rm -Rf ~/.rustup

Windows's PowerShell now supports many Linux-like commands:

PS> rm ~/.rustup

This leads to the same result. After deleting the current installation, install rustup from scratch—this should install the latest version.

Now, let's go behind the scenes to understand the code better.

How it works...

The shell script, rustup.sh, is a great way to install Rust and it is the primary way to install Rust and other components today. In fact, it is common to use the script also in CI systems to install the compiler and other tools.

rustup is an open source project maintained by the Rust project and can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup.rs.

We've successfully learned how to set up our environment. Now let's move on to the next recipe.

Key benefits

Work through recipes featuring advanced concepts such as concurrency, unsafe code, and macros to migrate your codebase to the Rust programming language

Learn how to run machine learning models with Rust

Explore error handling, macros, and modularization to write maintainable code

Description

Rust 2018, Rust's first major milestone since version 1.0, brings more advancement in the Rust language. The Rust Programming Cookbook is a practical guide to help you overcome challenges when writing Rust code. This Rust book covers recipes for configuring Rust for different environments and architectural designs, and provides solutions to practical problems. It will also take you through Rust's core concepts, enabling you to create efficient, high-performance applications that use features such as zero-cost abstractions and improved memory management. As you progress, you'll delve into more advanced topics, including channels and actors, for building scalable, production-grade applications, and even get to grips with error handling, macros, and modularization to write maintainable code. You will then learn how to overcome common roadblocks when using Rust for systems programming, IoT, web development, and network programming. Finally, you'll discover what Rust 2018 has to offer for embedded programmers. By the end of the book, you'll have learned how to build fast and safe applications and services using Rust.

What you will learn

Understand how Rust provides unique solutions to solve system programming language problems

Grasp the core concepts of Rust to develop fast and safe applications

Explore the possibility of integrating Rust units into existing applications for improved efficiency

Discover how to achieve better parallelism and security with Rust

Write Python extensions in Rust

Compile external assembly files and use the Foreign Function Interface (FFI)

Build web applications and services using Rust for high performance

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