rust

Rust Development

Purpose: Best practices for Rust development including ownership, error handling, concurrency, and safety patterns.

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When to Use This Skill

• Building Rust applications and systems
• Working with ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes
• Implementing error handling with Result and Option types
• Writing concurrent code with threads and async
• Designing trait-based abstractions

Decision Tree

Rust Project Decision
+-- Building a CLI tool?
|   +-- Argument parsing? -> clap
|   +-- Pretty output? -> anyhow + color-eyre
+-- Building a web service?
|   +-- Async HTTP? -> axum or actix-web
|   +-- Need middleware? -> tower (used by axum)
+-- Error handling strategy?
|   +-- Library code? -> thiserror (typed errors)
|   +-- Application code? -> anyhow (ergonomic errors)
+-- Async runtime?
|   +-- General purpose? -> tokio
|   +-- Lightweight? -> smol or async-std
+-- Serialization needed? -> serde + serde_json / serde_yaml
+-- Performance-critical path? -> Benchmark with criterion before optimizing

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.94+ installed via rustup
• Cargo package manager

Table of Contents

1. Project Structure
2. Ownership and Borrowing
3. Error Handling
4. Traits and Generics
5. Concurrency
6. Testing
7. Performance
8. Security
9. Best Practices

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Project Structure

Standard Layout

project/
+-- src/
| +-- main.rs # Binary entry point
| +-- lib.rs # Library root
| +-- config.rs # Configuration
| +-- error.rs # Error types
| +-- models/
| | +-- mod.rs
| | -- user.rs
| -- services/
| +-- mod.rs
| -- user_service.rs
+-- tests/
| -- integration_tests.rs
+-- benches/
| -- benchmarks.rs
+-- examples/
| -- basic_usage.rs
+-- Cargo.toml
+-- Cargo.lock
-- README.md

Cargo.toml

[package]
name = "myapp"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"
authors = ["Your Name <[email protected]>"]
description = "A brief description"

[dependencies]
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
serde = { version = "1", features = ["derive"] }
thiserror = "1"
anyhow = "1"

[dev-dependencies]
tokio-test = "0.4"

[profile.release]
lto = true
opt-level = 3