Rust

Systems programming language that guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector. The ownership system prevents data races, dangling pointers, and double frees at compile time. Zero-cost abstractions mean you pay no runtime penalty for high-level patterns.

Overview

• Language: Compiled systems language with ownership-based memory management
• Install: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
• Build tool: Cargo (package manager, build system, test runner, doc generator)
• Build: cargo build (debug) / cargo build --release (optimized)
• Run: cargo run
• Test: cargo test
• Use cases: CLI tools, web services, WebAssembly, embedded systems, game engines, OS components
• Edition: Rust 2024 (latest), backwards-compatible with older editions

Contents

• Concepts - Core language ideas
  • Ownership - Ownership, borrowing, and move semantics
  • Traits - Interfaces, trait bounds, and common standard traits
  • Error Handling - Result, Option, the ? operator, and error strategies
• Quickstart - Get building
  • Setup - Install Rust, create a project, configure your editor
  • CLI Tool - Build a file search tool with clap and anyhow
• Deep Dives - Advanced topics
  • Async Rust - Futures, Tokio, async/await patterns
  • Pattern Matching - Match expressions, destructuring, state machines
  • Lifetimes - Reference validity, elision rules, named lifetimes
  • Ecosystem - Libraries and frameworks for web, CLI, databases, and more
• Notes - Practical tips
  • Gotchas - Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Resources

• The Rust Book - Official tutorial, start here
• Rust by Example - Learn through annotated examples
• Rust Playground - Run Rust in the browser
• std library docs - Standard library reference
• crates.io - Package registry
• This Week in Rust - Weekly newsletter