Rust for the Polyglot Programmer

Rust for the experienced programmer, a guide.

See the Introduction for the rubric, goals, and non-goals. See the Colophon for other formats available, authorship and acknowledgements, making contributions and corrections, and document source code,

Table of Contents

• Introduction and overview
  • Alternatives or supplements to this guide
  • Language
  • Implementation, docs, tooling, etc.
  • Library ecosystem
  • The Rust Project
• Syntax
  • Attributes
  • Items
  • Expressions
  • Other statements
  • Identifiers and scopes
• Types and patterns
  • Generics
  • Types
    • Some very important nominal types from the standard library
  • Literals
    • Nominal types (e.g., structs)
  • Coercion
  • Patterns
  • Uninhabited types
  • Other features
• Ownership, memory model
  • Ownership
  • Movement, Copy, Clone, Drop
  • Interior mutability and runtime lifetime management
  • Borrow checker
    • Tactics for fighting the borrow checker
    • Strategies for evading the borrow checker
• Traits, methods
  • Methods
  • Traits
    • Iterators: Iterator, IntoIterator, FromIterator
    • Existential types
    • Closures and the fn pointer type
    • dyn closures
    • Monomorphised closures f: F where F: Fn()
    • fn pointers
    • Some other key traits
  • Deref and method resolution
• Safety, threadsafety
  • Safety
  • Integers, conversion, checking
  • Thread safety
  • Global variables
  • Unsafe Rust
• Error handling
  • Result / ?
    • Error types
    • Crate- and module-local Result and Error
  • Panic
• Macros and metaprogramming
  • Overview
    • Macro invocation syntax
  • "Macros by example" macro_rules!
  • Procedural macros proc_macro
    • Practicalities
  • build.rs
• Async Rust
  • Introduction
  • Fundamentals
    • Innards
  • Practicalities
    • Choosing a runtime
    • Mixing and matching sync and async; thread context
    • Pin
    • Anonymous future types, traits, etc.
    • Cancellation safety
    • Send
    • Error messages
    • Libraries and utilities
• FFI
  • Raw C FFI
  • FFI support crates
  • FFI use in practice
  • Alternatives - consider serde, json, etc.
• Documentation and testing
  • rustdoc
  • Tests
  • Doctests
  • Test annotations
• Stability
  • Rust language, release channels
    • Nightly
    • Stable
  • Editions
  • API stability management tools
  • Libraries - semver
• Cargo
  • Basics
  • Security implications
    • Strategies
  • Other problems and limitations
• Libraries
  • Libraries you should know about
  • Libraries for specific purposes
  • serde
  • Web tools and frameworks
  • Command line parsing: clap
• Colophon
  • Canonical location
  • Contributing
  • Acknowledgements
  • Legal