Preface

I have always been a bit of a programming language nerd. Growing up, I realized that we live in some of the most exciting time to be alive, the digital revolution is in full force. In the span of a century, we have fundamentally changed the way we operate and communicate, by bringing computers into our daily lives.

Every programming language is a product of its time. Early programming languages existed in much more resource-constrained environments. They had to be designed so that they could be compiled without needing to use too much computing power or memory.

But now, well into the 21st century, we live in an overabundance of computing resources. Yet, we still continue using the same languages that we came up with 50 years ago. And we can feel the pain: the applications we use are often either insecure or slow.

In my mind, Rust is a bit of fresh air in the programming language world. It is unique in being one of the few languages that manages to pack revolutionary ideas (memory safety in a systems language, borrow checker) into a language that is usable in the real world. Previous attempts at adding safety have typically ended up as language that are neat from an academic viewpoint but not usable in practise. But now, even Microsoft and Google are adopting it.

To me, Rust makes programming very joyful. It is like LEGO, you have all these little pieces and you can put them together any way you want. You can write multithreaded code with confidence. You can write async code with confidence. You can mix and match. And unlike C and C++, you can have confidence that they actually work, and that your application doesn’t collapse like a Jenga tower once it gets too big.

Rust certainly isn’t perfect, but in my opinion it is fun. And I would like more people to be able to enjoy it. In this book, I try to compress all of the things I have learned from using Rust in the past 8 years, to make sure that you can build cool things, too.

License

I’m licensing this book under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Licensing it this way gives you a lot of freedom to adapt this book and update it, as long as you do not do so for commercial gain. I hope that it will be useful to some.

If you want to give something back to the Rust community, I suggest you get involved in the community, for example:

If you are new to the Rust programming language, I recommend you to spend some time writing documentation for Rust crates that need it. It is a good way to be exposed to some Rust code and make an impact. Adding good documentation is usually appreciated and uncontroversial.