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1 - Getting Started

This chapter is going to get Rust installed, and explain how to use cargo to create and build a new project.

1.1 - Installation​

On Linux or MacOS:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
xcode-select --install

On Windows, you can still use rustup, but check the official documentation for how to go about installing it.

Verify your installation with rustc --version. Upgrade with rustup update.

1.2 - Hello, World!​

Tradition dictates that we can't learn a new programming language without starting with a program that prints "Hello, world!". Let's create a file called "main.rs":

main.rs
fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Indenting in Rust is done with four spaces, not tabs, and statements end with ";". Here we're calling the println! macro - you can tell its a macro because it ends with !. You can run this with:

$ rustc main.rs
$ ./main
Hello, world!

rustc compiles the source to an executable called main, and then ./main runs the executable.

1.3 - Hello, Cargo!​

Cargo is Rust's build system and package manager. It's a bit like npm in JavaScript, or the go command in Go.

Creating a Project with Cargo​

$ cargo new hello_cargo
$ cd hello_cargo

This creates a Cargo.toml file and a src/main.rs file inside a new folder, and also initializes the new folder as a git repo. Cargo.toml is a toml file (which looks a lot like an old-fashioned Windows .ini file). The [package] section of Cargo.toml describes metadata about the current package, and the [dependencies] section lists any libraries (aka crates) that your project depends on.

We can build and run this project with:

$ cargo build
$ ./target/debug/hello_cargo

Or with this shortcut, which is equivalent to the above:

$ cargo run

Note that cargo build creates a Cargo.lock file - this is a dependency lockfile which means if you share this project with a friend, and they cargo build, they'll get exactly the same dependencies that you did. It's a good idea to commit the lockfile to your source code management tool.

You can verify that a project compiles without producing an executable with cargo check, which is often much faster than cargo build. You can build a "release version" of your code with cargo build --release which will generate an executable in target/release instead of target/debug. The release version will be missing symbols and some runtime safety checks, and will be better optimized.

Continue to chapter 2.