This practical book introduces systems programmers to Rust, the new and cutting-edge language that’s still in the experimental/lab stage. You’ll learn how Rust offers the rare and valuable combination of statically verified memory safety and low-level control—imagine C++, but without dangling pointers, null pointer dereferences, leaks, or buffer overruns.

Author Jim Blandy—the maintainer of GNU Emacs and GNU Guile—demonstrates how Rust has the potential to be the first usable programming language that brings the benefits of an expressive modern type system to systems programming. Rust’s rules for borrowing, mutability, ownership, and moves versus copies will be unfamiliar to most systems programmers, but they’re key to Rust’s unique advantages.

This book presents Rust’s rules clearly and economically; elaborates on their consequences; and shows you how to express the programs you want to write in terms that Rust can prove are free of a broad class of common errors.

Jim Blandy has been programming since 1981, and writing Free software since 1990. He has been the maintainer of GNU Emacs and GNU Guile, and a maintainer of GDB, the GNU Debugger. He is one of the original designers of the Subversion version control system. Jim now works on Firefox’s web developer tools for Mozilla.