Rust and Systems Programming Basics Roadmap

Learn Rust and the systems concepts behind it: memory, ownership, concurrency and low-level I/O.

10 milestones · ~175 hours total

1. 1

   How computers run programs

   ~14h

   Stack vs heap, pointers, memory layout, processes and system calls. A little C reading helps.

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2. 2

   Rust basics

   ~18h

   Cargo, variables, types, control flow, structs, enums, pattern matching and modules.

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3. 3

   Ownership, borrowing and lifetimes

   ~25h

   Move semantics, references, the borrow checker and reading compiler errors calmly.

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4. 4

   Error handling and collections

   ~16h

   Result and Option, the ? operator, Vec, HashMap, iterators and closures.

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5. 5

   Traits and generics

   ~14h

   Defining behaviour, trait bounds, trait objects vs generics and common standard traits.

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6. 6

   Smart pointers and memory

   ~12h

   Box, Rc, Arc, RefCell, Drop and why the compiler rejects certain designs.

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7. 7

   Concurrency

   ~20h

   Threads, channels, Mutex, Send and Sync, then async/await with Tokio at an introductory level.

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8. 8

   Systems-level I/O and networking

   ~18h

   Files, sockets and processes; write a small TCP echo server and a command-line tool with clap.

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9. 9

   Testing, tooling and unsafe

   ~8h

   cargo test, clippy, rustfmt, documentation, and what unsafe means and when it is justified.

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10. 10

    Build a systems project

    ~30h

    Examples: a grep clone, a key-value store or a simple HTTP server, with tests and a written design note.

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