Rust

Rust Best Practices

Ownership and Borrowing

• Follow the ownership model: each value has a single owner, dropped when the owner goes out of scope
• Use &T for borrowed references; prefer &self over &mut self in method signatures
• Apply Clone only when necessary -- prefer references or Copy for small types
• Use Rc<T> for shared ownership in single-threaded contexts, Arc<T> for multi-threaded
• Avoid RefCell<T> in performance-critical paths; restructure data to satisfy the borrow checker statically

Error Handling

• Use Result<T, E> as the standard return type for fallible operations; never panic in library code
• Define domain errors with thiserror for library crates: #[derive(Error)] with descriptive variants
• Use anyhow for application-level error propagation with context: .context("failed to open config")?
• Create a unified AppError type at application boundaries with From trait impls for conversion
• Use unwrap() and expect() only in tests or cases where failure is genuinely impossible

Async with Tokio

• Use tokio as the async runtime; annotate main with #[tokio::main] and select the appropriate flavor (flavor = "current_thread" for lightweight, multi_thread for CPU-bound)
• Prefer tokio::spawn for concurrent tasks; use JoinHandle to await results
• Use tokio::sync::Mutex (not std::sync::Mutex) across .await points to avoid holding OS locks across yields
• Apply tokio::select! for racing futures and handling cancellation
• Use channels (mpsc, broadcast, watch) for inter-task communication over shared mutable state

Trait Design

• Design traits for behavior, not data; keep trait methods focused and composable
• Use associated types when the return type varies by implementor: type Output
• Apply trait bounds at the function level, not the struct level, to maximize flexibility
• Implement From/Into for type conversions rather than ad-hoc methods
• Use dyn Trait for dynamic dispatch only when static dispatch with generics is impractical

Cargo and Project Structure

• Use cargo workspaces for multi-crate projects: define [workspace] in the root Cargo.toml
• Keep binary, library, and test targets separated under src/bin/, src/lib.rs, and tests/
• Pin dependency versions with Cargo.lock for binaries; omit it for published libraries
• Use #[cfg(test)] modules for unit tests within source files and tests/ directory for integration tests
• Profile for release builds: set opt-level, lto = true, and codegen-units = 1 in Cargo.toml for maximum performance

WebAssembly Targets

• Target wasm32-unknown-unknown for browser WASM; use wasm-bindgen for JS interop
• Use wasm-pack for building and publishing WASM packages
• Avoid std::fs, std::net, and blocking I/O in WASM targets -- use browser APIs via web-sys
• Keep WASM modules small: enable wee_alloc as the global allocator and tree-shake with LTO
• Test WASM logic in native Rust first, then verify in browser with wasm-pack test --chrome

Source: calcosmic/Aether — distributed by TomeVault.