Rust for C-Programmers

22.11 Summary

Rust’s fearless concurrency comes from:

1. Ownership and Borrowing: The compiler enforces correct data sharing, preventing data races.
2. Versatile Concurrency Primitives: Support for OS threads, async tasks, mutexes, condition variables, channels, and more.
3. High-level Parallel Libraries: Rayon for easy data parallelism, SIMD for vectorized operations.
4. Safe Typing with Send and Sync: Only types proven safe for cross-thread usage can be moved or shared between threads.

Threads let you control CPU-bound parallelism directly, while async tasks suit I/O-bound workloads that spend a lot of time waiting. Patterns like Arc<Mutex<T>> and RwLock<T> facilitate shared-memory concurrency, and channels allow data transfer without shared mutable state. If you need a functional-style approach to parallel loops, Rayon integrates neatly with Rust’s iterator framework.

Compared to C or C++, Rust significantly reduces the risk of data races and other multithreading issues, allowing you to write code that is both performant and easier to reason about.