5.11 Summary

In this chapter, we covered:

  • Keywords that define Rust’s core constructs, comparing them with C/C++.
  • Expressions and Statements, including how block expressions can return values.
  • Data Types, both scalar (integers, floats, booleans, chars) and compound (tuples, arrays).
  • Variables and Mutability, illustrating Rust’s immutability-by-default approach and the use of mut when necessary.
  • Operators, noting that Rust lacks ++/-- and requires matching operand types.
  • Numeric Literals, explaining how to use suffixes and underscores for clarity and explicit typing.
  • Overflow Handling, describing how Rust checks for overflow in debug mode, wraps in release mode, and offers explicit overflow-handling methods.
  • Performance Considerations, highlighting trade-offs among numeric types, floating-point precision, and alignment.
  • Comments, including single-line, multi-line, and documentation comments (both outer and inner) for generating Rust docs.

These fundamentals form a solid foundation for writing Rust programs. While many concepts resemble those in C, Rust’s stricter rules and compile-time checks provide additional safety guarantees. In upcoming chapters, we will delve into Rust’s ownership model and borrowing rules, demonstrating how they interoperate with the basics covered here. We will also explore control flow, functions, modules, and more advanced data structures such as vectors and strings, illustrating the power and flexibility of Rust’s design.