Rust Quick Guide

Rust Quick Guide provides short topic explanations to help people learn about the Rust programming language, ecosystem, concepts, crates, and more. You can try any topic, in any order, at any time, akin to a frequently asked questions resource.

Rust Quick Guide works best as an adjunct to a comprehensive Rust book, such as the The Rust Programming Language. The book is valuable to read, cover to cover, for its excellent technical explanations.

We welcome constructive advice, new topic ideas, pull requests, open issues, and the like. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Rust Quick Guide is continually evolving, with ongoing additions, corrections, and optimizations.

Start here

Introduction

• What is the Rust Quick Guide?

• What are the Rust Quick Guide projects?

• Who is this for?

• How can I contribute?

Welcome to Rust

• What is a Rust "Hello World" program? + project

• What is a Rust "FizzBuzz" program? + project

• What is a Rust "Fibonacci" program? + project

Learning

• What makes Rust good?

• What is the Rust ecosystem?

• Who might benefit from learning Rust?

• What are good ways to learn Rust?

• What are good projects to learn Rust?

• Is Rust a good first language?

Caveats

• What are the hardest parts of Rust?

• Rust stable versus Rust nightly

• What is Rust missing?

• What are some non-goals of Rust?

• Why do companies not use Rust?

What makes Rust special?

• The borrow checker + example

• Channels for thread communication

• Concurrency and parallelism

• Error messages

• Foreign Function Interface (FFI)

• Futures for asynchronous operations

• Monomorphisation of generic code

• Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII)

• Unsafe code

• WebAssembly (WASM) + example

• Zero-cost abstractions + example

Types, Traits, Keywords, Macros

Type summaries

• Scalar types

• Compound types

• Sum types and product types

• str type versus String type

• String types for UTF-8, C, OS, and paths

• Box type for a smart pointer

• Cow type for clone-on-write

• RefCell type for dynamic borrowing

• Rc type for single-thread sharing

• Arc type for multi-thread sharing

• Pin type for memory location + example

Trait summaries

• Copy trait and Clone trait for duplicating values

• Debug trait for debugging and printing

• Display trait for formatting

• dyn trait for dynamic dispatch

• dyn trait in a type position

• Eq, PartialEq, Ord, PartialOrd traits

• From and Into traits for conversions

• Send trait for sending among threads

• Sync trait for syncing among threads

• Send & Sync - implementations

• Sealed traits

Keywords summaries

• enum keyword for enumerations

• struct keyword for structures

• union keyword for multi-type memory

• match keyword for control flow

• mod keyword for module namespaces

• mod keyword for nested hierarchies

• nested-or-pattern for matching

• async/await keywords for futures

• trait keyword for polymorphism

Macro summaries

• println! macro for printing output

• assert! macro and friends for testing

• regex! macro for lazy static optimization

• catch_unwind! macro for handling panic

• macro_rules! macro for declarative macros

Coding

Syntax

• Annotations for compiler directives

• Destructuring into components

• Iterators for traversing collections

• Closures for anonymous functions

• Macros for metaprogramming

• Panic and how to handle it with a hook

• Pass by value or reference

• Range syntax for a sequence of values

• Tuples for ordered collections

Memory

• Memory lifetimes

• Implicit lifetimes

• Explicit lifetimes

• Memory on the stack or the heap

• Memory ownership and borrowing + example

• Mutability and immutability

• No garbage collection

• Borrow splitting

Testing

• Test framework

• Test assertions

• Unit testing

• Integration testing

• Documentation testing

• Documentation testing annotations

• Source-based code coverage

• Test-driven development (TDD) + example + projecct

Examples

• Access a database with rusqlite + project

• Benchmark run times with Bencher + example + project

• Concurrency with std::thread

• Liskov substitution principle (LSP) + example

• List directories recursively with walkdir + project

• Make HTTP request with reqwest + project

• Memoize a function with cached + project

• Parallel iterate with search- + project

• Parse JSON data with Serde + project

• Read a spreadsheet with CSV + project

• Run a terminal program with cursive + project

• Search text file lines with regex + project

Tooling & tactics

Tooling we use often

• rustup command-line tool

• Cargo package manager and crates

• cargo-install-favorites for many tools

• Blessed recommendations

• Clippy linting

• Helix text editor for writing code

• Rustfmt for code formatting + examples

• Rust mdBook for documentation

• Cross-compiling for multiple platforms

• Rhai script

Tooling concepts

• Abstract syntax tree (AST)

• Tree-sitter parsing library

• Language Server Protocol (LSP)

• Static analysis for error detection

• Debugger for diagnostics + example and

Design patterns

• Design patterns: introduction

• Design patterns: adapter

• Design patterns: builder

• Design patterns: observer

• Design patterns: singleton

Crates

Crates we like for many of our programs

• Assertables crate for assert macro tests + project

• cached crate for memoization + project

• log crate for logging messages + project

• itertools crate for iterator extras + project

• num crate for number types and traits + project

• once_cell crate for lazy global variables + project

• syn crate for syntax analysis

• regex crate for regular expressions + project

• Serde crate for serialize/deserialize + project

• Strum crate for enums + project

• rand crate for random numbers + project

Crates we like for command line interfaces

• CLAP crate for commands + example + project

• Textwrap crate for text wrapping + example + project

• [Cursive crate for text user interfaces](doc/crates/cursive