Chapter 5: Common Programming Concepts

This chapter introduces a set of fundamental programming concepts that most languages share, illustrating how they work in Rust and comparing them with C. We begin with keywords, which define the core structure of the language, followed by expressions and statements, data types, variables, and operators. We then examine numeric literals, discuss arithmetic overflow, and consider the performance characteristics of numeric types. Finally, we look at how comments work in Rust.

While Rust’s ownership and borrowing rules distinguish it from C, this chapter focuses on features common to many programming languages. We will explore control flow constructs (such as if statements and loops) and functions in later chapters, after covering memory management in detail, because these features often interact closely with Rust’s ownership model. Rust’s struct type, its powerful enum type, and standard library collection types like vectors and strings will each be explained in their own chapters.