Chapter 13: Mastering 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 manipulation and index tracking for loops, Rust’s iterators represent a significant shift towards expressing what to do with each element, rather than the low-level mechanics of how to access it. This higher level of abstraction effectively prevents common errors like off-by-one bugs, invalid memory access, or iterator invalidation issues that can plague manual C-style loops. This chapter delves into using Rust’s built-in iterators, creating custom iterators for your own data structures, and understanding how Rust achieves high performance through its zero-cost abstractions.