Rust aims to provide a more ergonomic programming experience to all developers while helping you to write less insecure and faulty code (especially when it comes to low-level code and concurrency) and producing fast and stable programs.

Installation

The easiest way to get set up is to use the official toolchain installer, rustup.

In Linux and MacOS/OSX

Execute the following command in the CLI:

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

If you have an installation of Rust already on your system, be sure to first uninstall it, e.g. if on MacOS with brew then brew remove rust

If on MacOS/OSX, ensure that you have a C compiler installed with xcode-select --install

In Windows

The simplest option is to download the installer here_x32 or here_x64 and run it.

Installation confirmation

In order to confirm that the rustc compiler is installed and ready for action, run:

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rustc --version

You should see something like:

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$ rustc --version
rustc 1.64.0 (a55dd71d5 2022-09-19)

Writing your first Rust program

In keeping with programming tradition we shall hack together a quick program that prints “Hello, World!” to standard output.

Fire up your favourite editor/IDE (I’m hoping you choose Vim 😬), type up the following bit of code and save it as main.rs:

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// main.rs

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, World!");
}

The basics of main.rs

  • fn is the keyword to define a function in Rust and in this case, i.e. the main function, it is the entrypoint into the program.
  • functions need to be wrapped with braces i.e. {}
  • code should be indented with 4 spaces, not tabs.
  • macro calls look like function calls except for the exclamation mark in between the name and the opening parenthesis e.g. println() vs println!()
  • lines end with a semi-colon.

Compiling and running

Compiling and running your Rust programs is a two-step process. To compile the program, run:

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rustc main.rs

And to run the binary:

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./main

These can be combined with the AND/&& operator in your shell thusly:

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rustc main.rs && ./main

Note: if you’re on Windows, omitting the ./ should work 😬

You should see the following output:

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$ rustc main.rs && ./main
Hello, World!

In the next article we’ll start diving in to the details 😬