The Rust Programming Language

Welcome! This book will teach you about the Rust Programming Language. Rust is a systems programming language focused on three goals: safety, speed, and concurrency. It maintains these goals without having a garbage collector, making it a useful language for a number of use cases other languages aren’t good at: embedding in other languages, programs with specific space and time requirements, and writing low-level code, like device drivers and operating systems. It improves on current languages targeting this space by having a number of compile-time safety checks that produce no runtime overhead, while eliminating all data races. Rust also aims to achieve ‘zero-cost abstractions’ even though some of these abstractions feel like those of a high-level language. Even then, Rust still allows precise control like a low-level language would.

“The Rust Programming Language” is split into chapters. This introduction is the first. After this:

• Getting started - Set up your computer for Rust development.
• Tutorial: Guessing Game - Learn some Rust with a small project.
• Syntax and Semantics - Each bit of Rust, broken down into small chunks.
• Effective Rust - Higher-level concepts for writing excellent Rust code.
• Glossary - A reference of terms used in the book.
• Bibliography - Background on Rust's influences, papers about Rust.

Contributing

The source files from which this book is generated can be found on GitHub.

Second edition of this book

There are two editions of "The Rust Programming Language", this being the first edition.

The second edition is a complete re-write. It is still under construction, though it is far enough along to learn most of Rust. We suggest reading the second edition and then checking out the first edition later to pick up some of the more esoteric parts of the language.