In this chapter, we'll take a look at what Rust has to offer for network programming. We'll start by exploring existing networking primitives in the standard library by building a simple Redis clone. This will help us get familiar with the default synchronous network I/O model and its limitations. Next, we'll explain how asynchrony is a better approach when dealing with network I/O on a large scale. In the process, we'll get to know about the abstractions provided by the Rust ecosystem for building asynchronous network applications and refactor our Redis server to make it asynchronous using third-party crates.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Network programming prelude
• Synchronous network I/O
• Building a simple Redis server
• Asynchronous network I/O
• An introduction to futures and tokio crates