Rust

An Introduction

Donald Robertson 2022-06-01

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About Me

  • I am a final year PhD student working on network transports and streaming media
  • I am also a professional software engineer with approximately 7 years of industry experience
  • I have been programming in Rust as a hobby for around 6 years
  • I am not an expert on programming languages
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What is Rust?

  • Rust is a systems general purpose programming language
  • The official website describes Rust as 'a language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software'
  • The language provides memory safety without the need for manual memory management or execution-time overheads like a runtime or garbage collection
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A Brief Timeline

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Language Features

Memory Safety

  • Ownership and borrowing
  • Rules are enforced at compile-time
  • Guarantees the absence of null pointers, dangling pointers (use-after-free), iterator invalidation and data races
  • Avoids the need for runtime overheads such as a language runtime or garbage collection
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Language Features

Type System

  • Separation of data and behaviour
  • Type inference but explicit mutability
  • Generics and monomorphization
  • Composition over inheritance
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Language Features

Macros, FFI and Unsafe

  • Macros provide metaprogramming capabilities
  • FFI provides bi-directional interop with other languages
  • Unsafe allows some of the safety checks to be disabled
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Personal Experience

  • Rust does more than any language I have used to guide you towards correctness
  • Ecosystem is increasingly broad and generally high quality
  • Community is incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic
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Questions?

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Installation

For Linux and macOS

  • Rust is often available via system package managers, however the version they provide is not always up to date which can cause issues when developing or installing existing tools from source
  • The recommended way to install Rust is via 
    rustup
     by running the below command and selecting the default installation option when prompted: 
    $ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
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Installation

For Windows and Other Platforms

  • For users of Windows the recommended method to install Rust is still via 
    rustup
    , but the means of obtaining 
    rustup
    is different
  • The installer may be obtained by visiting the 
    rustup
    website     and selecting the appropriate installer for your machine
  • Alternatively, users of any architecture supported by Rust may download the appropriate 
    rustup
    installer from those available in the official documentation
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Development Environment

Rust Analyzer + ...

  • rust-analyzer
    implements the Language Server Protocol (LSP) for Rust to enable IDE-like features in popular editors that support LSP
  • Enabling integration with various popular editors is described in the 
    rust-analyzer
    documentation
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Development Environment

JetBrains IDEs

  • Users of the JetBrains suite of IDEs should instead install IntelliJ Rust
  • IntelliJ Rust adds language support and enables common IDE features including code completion to be used with Rust while providing integration with Cargo and a test runner
  • For maximum support, the CLion IDE should be used, CLion includes a Rust-compatible debugger, CPU profiler and Valgrind memcheck for Rust
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Coding Exercise

A Guessing Game

  • The Rust Programming Language, commonly referred to as "The Book", is a great introduction to many features of the language (and is also available in print)
  • The second chapter provides a walkthrough of programming a guessing game in Rust
  • The complete example includes use of the 
    cargo
    command-line tool, handling input and writing output using the standard library and using a third-party crate to include extra functionality
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Example Website

  • The increasingly rich ecosystem of packages available from crates.io makes it easy to be productive in a number of domains
  • An example of this is in the area of web development, an increasing number of crates provide functionality for everything from front-end development (via compilation to WebAssembly) to database and third-party API integrations
  • These slides are hosted on a website written using only Rust, HTML and CSS, the code is available on GitHub (including the on-disk representation of these slides)
  • Beyond this, Rust continues to gain traction for game development, command- line tooling, OS development, network protocol implementation, ...
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Ecosystem and Tooling

  • cargo
    and Crates
  • Rust-Analyzer and IntelliJ Rust
  • Clippy and Rustfmt
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Useful Resources

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Summary

  • Rust is a programming language with a focus on creating robust software without sacrificing performance
  • Thank you for attending!
Ferris, the unofficial mascot of Rust