Chapter 13: Working with Iterators in Rust

Iterators are a cornerstone of idiomatic Rust programming, offering a powerful, safe, and efficient abstraction for processing sequences of data. For C programmers accustomed to manual pointer arithmetic and index tracking within loops (for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i), while (*ptr)), Rust’s iterators represent a significant shift. They allow you to express what you want to do with each element in a sequence, rather than focusing on the low-level mechanics of how to access it. This higher level of abstraction effectively prevents common C errors like off-by-one bugs, dereferencing invalid pointers, or iterator invalidation issues that arise when modifying a collection while iterating over it manually.

This chapter delves into using Rust’s built-in iterators, implementing custom iterators for your own data structures, and understanding how Rust achieves high performance through its zero-cost abstractions, often matching or exceeding the speed of equivalent C code.