The Rust programming language

Rust is a system programming language that focusses on three aspects: Speed, Safety and Concurrency. It is being developed by an active community of programmers. Its development is officially sponsored by Mozilla.

Installing rust

First, we have to install the rust compiler which is called rustc and cargo ,rust’s package manager. I recommend installing rustc and cargo using rustup. Why rustup? Before answering that I have to mention that rustc comes in three versions : Stable , Beta and Nightly.

Rustup is a multi toolchain installer that lets you manage different versions of rustc and also lets you cross compile for different architectures and operating systems. Simply put , it makes installation easy.

To install rustup ,go to rustup.rs and follow the instructions.

Sometimes you have to add the path of cargo directory to the environment variables.

In linux , type in

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.cargo/bin

where $HOME/.cargo/bin is the default cargo directory.

After installing , type in rustc and cargo in the terminal or command prompt. If it prints unknown command , you probably have not installed it properly.

Writing rust code

To write rust code , you can use an ordinary text editor or you can install bindings for popular IDEs. I’ll have links to that below.

I recommend using Atom. It has a lot of packages that helps in writing rust code. If you are going to use atom then be sure to install the following packages.

Atom packages for rust:

  • language-rust
  • linter-rust (shows errors while typing )
  • rustfmt (formats code while saving the file)
  • racer (code completion utility)

Hello World

So now that you have installed rustc and cargo. Let’s create a sample program. To create a binary application using cargo run :

cargo new helloworld --bin

Cargo automatically creates a hello world program in a file named main.rs in the src folder. To build it open terminal in the project directory and run

cargo build

This will create an executable in the debug folder. To run this program type in

cargo run

If you see Hello World printed on the screen then you have just executed your first rust program.

The official rust website : www.rust-lang.org

Rustup : www.rustup.rs

Atom text editor : www.atom.io

The book (Official rust documentation) : doc.rust-lang.org/book

Rust extensions for various IDEs : see awesome-rust list

IRC channels : #rust #rust-beginners on irc.mozilla.org