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

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.75+ 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 <you@example.com>"]
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

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Best Practices

[PASS] DO

• Use clippy for linting: cargo clippy
• Format with rustfmt: cargo fmt
• Prefer &str over String for function parameters
• Use #[derive] for common traits
• Write documentation with ///
• Use Result for recoverable errors
• Leverage the type system for safety

[FAIL] DON'T

• Use unwrap() in production code
• Ignore compiler warnings
• Use unsafe without clear justification
• Clone unnecessarily
• Write overly complex lifetimes
• Panic for expected error conditions

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References

• The Rust Book
• Rust by Example
• Rust API Guidelines
• Tokio Tutorial

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Version: 1.0 Last Updated: February 5, 2026

Troubleshooting

Issue	Solution
Borrow checker errors	Use .clone() for simple cases, refactor with owned types or Arc<Mutex<T>>
Lifetime annotation confusion	Start with owned types, add references only when performance requires it
Async runtime errors	Ensure using #[tokio::main] or equivalent, dont mix sync and async without spawn_blocking