2.18 Additional Core Concepts Preview

This chapter provided a high-level tour. Many powerful Rust features build upon these basics. Here’s a glimpse of what subsequent chapters will explore in detail:

  • Standard Library: Rich collections (Vec<T> dynamic arrays, HashMap<K, V> hash maps), I/O, networking, threading primitives, and more. Generally more comprehensive than the C standard library.
  • Compound Data Types: In-depth look at structs (like C structs), enums (more powerful than C enums, acting like tagged unions), and tuples.
  • Ownership, Borrowing, Lifetimes: The core mechanisms ensuring memory safety. Understanding these is crucial for writing idiomatic Rust.
  • Pattern Matching: Advanced control flow with match, enabling exhaustive checks and destructuring of data.
  • Generics: Writing code that operates over multiple types without duplication, similar to C++ templates but with different trade-offs and compile-time guarantees.
  • Concurrency: Rust’s fearless concurrency approach using threads, message passing, and shared state primitives (Mutex, Arc) that prevent data races at compile time via the Send and Sync traits.
  • Asynchronous Programming: Built-in async/await syntax for non-blocking I/O, used with runtime libraries like tokio or async-std for highly concurrent applications.
  • Testing: Integrated support for unit tests, integration tests, and documentation tests via cargo test.
  • unsafe Rust: A controlled escape hatch to bypass some compiler guarantees when necessary (e.g., for Foreign Function Interface (FFI), hardware interaction, or specific optimizations), clearly marking potentially unsafe code blocks.
  • Tooling: Beyond cargo build and cargo run, exploring clippy (linter for common mistakes and style issues), dependency management, workspaces, and more.