Summary

In this chapter, we explored the role of Rust in today's landscape, showing that Rust's paradigm-changing position is a result of being memory-safe, while not having any garbage collection. With this, we understood why it beats most languages (including Golang) when it comes to speed. We then went over the quirks that Rust has when it comes to strings, lifetimes, memory management, and typing, so we can write safe and efficient Rust code as Python developers. We then covered structs and traits to the point where we could mimic the basic functionality of a Python object with mixins, utilizing their traits as types for the Rust struct while we were at it.

We covered the basic concepts of lifetimes and borrowing. This enables us to have more control over how we implement our structs and functions within our program, giving us multiple avenues to turn to when solving a problem. With all this, we can safely code single-page applications with confidence over concepts that would stump someone who has never coded in Rust. However, we know, as experienced Python developers, that any serious program worth coding spans multiple pages. Considering this, we can use what we have learned here to move on to the next chapter, where we set up a Rust environment on our own computers and learn how to structure Rust code over multiple files, enabling us to get one step closer to building packages in Rust and installing them with pip.