Rust Best Practices

Rust Best Practices

Based on Microsoft Pragmatic Rust Guidelines and Rust community standards.

Core Principles

1. Leverage the type system — Use types to make invalid states unrepresentable
2. Embrace ownership — Work with the borrow checker, not against it
3. Explicit over implicit — Be clear about fallibility, mutability, and lifetimes
4. Zero-cost abstractions — Use iterators, generics, and traits without runtime cost
5. Fail fast, recover gracefully — Validate early, handle errors explicitly

Error Handling

Use thiserror for Libraries

use thiserror::Error;

#[derive(Error, Debug)]
pub enum MyError {
    #[error("IO error: {0}")]
    Io(#[from] std::io::Error),
    #[error("Parse error at line {line}: {message}")]
    Parse { line: usize, message: String },
    #[error("Not found: {0}")]
    NotFound(String),
}

Use anyhow for Applications

use anyhow::{Context, Result};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let config = load_config()
        .context("Failed to load configuration")?;
    run_app(config)?;
    Ok(())