Installing Rust

Rust is under active development, and some of its features are only available in experimental versions of the compiler. We may use some of these features. To get a compiler that supports them, run the rustup installer. Restart your editor so that it discovers the newly installed tools.

The Rust tools are also installed on stu.

First Program

Now that we have a compiler, we need some source code to compile. This code defines a main function that prints a message:

fn main() {
  let target = "Pluto";
  println!("Goodbyte, {}!", target);
}

Place this code in a file named main.rs.

The compiler is named rustc. We compile and run main.rs with these two commands:

> rustc main.rs
> ./main
Goodbye, Pluto!

That said, many Rust developers do not invoke the compiler directly. They instead use Cargo, a build tool and dependency manager in one that is installed alongside the compiler. We make a new Cargo project with these shell commands:

> cargo new my-project
> cd my-project

Then we add our code to the default src/main.rs and other files in that directory. Cargo will download any dependencies that haven't already been downloaded, build our project, and run it with this single command:

> cargo run
Goodbye, Pluto!

If we just want to compile but not execute the program, we run cargo build.