Tag: asm

What do some Rust features compile to? I have been starting to have a look at Rust lately, mostly because WASM is growing on me and Rust has the best tool in class for it, or so I am told. I am eager to find out by myself. Rust comes with several new idioms and structures in the language I am not used to, and being a performance enthusiast, I always get interested in what such constructs translate to.

Like many people who have backgrounds in higher level languages like JavaScript and Ruby, one thing that really attracted me to Rust was the ability to get “closer to the metal”. While Rust offers plenty of high level abstractions, it certainly makes you think a bit more about lower level concerns like the memory allocation than the JavaScript or Ruby do. But of course, you can always go deeper, and learning more about the abstraction layer underneath Rust can be a really great way to really understand what makes Rust tick.

In this series, we'll explore the world of assembly language from the perspective of a Rust developer. We'll treat the compiler as a black box and see what kind of assembly instructions get produced from standard, run-of-the-mill Rust code. Doing this should get us a bit closer to understanding what's actually happening on our machine (though, of course, the stack does even deeper than the assembly language abstraction layer).