Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed the basics of unsafe Rust and understood the key differences between safe and unsafe Rust. We saw how unsafe Rust enables us to perform operations that would not be allowed in safe Rust, such as dereferencing raw pointers, accessing or mutating static variables, working with unions, implementing unsafe traits, and calling external functions. We also looked at what a foreign function interface is, and how to write one in Rust. We wrote an example of invoking a C function from Rust. Also, in the example project, we wrote a Rust shared library and invoked it from a C program. We saw guidelines for how to write safe FFIs in Rust. We took a look at the ABI and annotations that can be used to specify conditional compilation, data layout, and link options.

With this, we conclude this chapter, and also this book.

I thank you for joining me on this journey into the world of system programming with Rust, and wish you the very best with exploring the...