The Rust Standard Library and systems programming

Before we dive into the standard library, let's understand the context of how it fits into systems programming.

In systems programming, one of the cardinal requirements is to manage system resources such as memory, files, network I/O, devices, and processes. Every operating system has a kernel (or equivalent), which is the central software module that is loaded in memory and connects the system hardware with the application processes. You may think, where does the Rust Standard Library fit in then? Are we going to write a kernel in Rust? No, that's not the purpose of this book. The most popular operating systems, which are basically the Unix, Linux, and Windows variants, all have kernels written mostly in C with a mix of assembly. It is still early days for Rust to augment C as the kernel development language, though there are several experimental efforts in that direction. However, what the Rust Standard Library offers...