% The Rust Guide
Hey there! Welcome to the Rust guide. This is the place to be if you‘d like to learn how to program in Rust. Rust is a systems programming language with a focus on “high-level, bare-metal programming”: the lowest level control a programming language can give you, but with zero-cost, higher level abstractions, because people aren’t computers. We really think Rust is something special, and we hope you do too.
To show you how to get going with Rust, we‘re going to write the traditional “Hello, World!” program. Next, we’ll introduce you to a tool that‘s useful for writing real-world Rust programs and libraries: “Cargo.” Then, we’ll show off Rust's features by writing a little program together.
Sound good? Let's go!
The first step to using Rust is to install it! There are a number of ways to install Rust, but the easiest is to use the the rustup script. If you‘re on Linux or a Mac, all you need to do is this (note that you don’t need to type in the $s, they just indicate the start of each command):
$ curl -s http://www.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sudo sh
(If you're concerned about curl | sudo sh, please keep reading. Disclaimer below.)
If you're on Windows, please download this .exe and run it.
If you decide you don‘t want Rust anymore, we’ll be a bit sad, but that's okay. Not every programming language is great for everyone. Just pass an argument to the script:
$ curl -s http://www.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sudo sh -s -- --uninstall
If you used the Windows installer, just re-run the .exe and it will give you an uninstall option.
You can re-run this script any time you want to update Rust. Which, at this point, is often. Rust is still pre-1.0, and so people assume that you're using a very recent Rust.
This brings me to one other point: some people, and somewhat rightfully so, get very upset when we tell you to curl | sudo sh. And they should be! Basically, when you do this, you are trusting that the good people who maintain Rust aren‘t going to hack your computer and do bad things. That’s a good instinct! If you‘re one of those people, please check out the documentation on building Rust from Source, or the official binary downloads. And we promise that this method will not be the way to install Rust forever: it’s just the easiest way to keep people updated while Rust is in its alpha state.
Oh, we should also mention the officially supported platforms:
We extensively test Rust on these platforms, and a few others, too, like Android. But these are the ones most likely to work, as they have the most testing.
Finally, a comment about Windows. Rust considers Windows to be a first-class platform upon release, but if we‘re honest, the Windows experience isn’t as integrated as the Linux/OS X experience is. We're working on it! If anything does not work, it is a bug. Please let us know if that happens. Each and every commit is tested against Windows just like any other platform.
If you've got Rust installed, you can open up a shell, and type this:
$ rustc --version
You should see some output that looks something like this:
rustc 0.11.0-pre (443a1cd 2014-06-08 14:56:52 -0700) host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
If you did, Rust has been installed successfully! Congrats!
If not, there are a number of places where you can get help. The easiest is the #rust IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org, which you can access through Mibbit. Click that link, and you'll be chatting with other Rustaceans (a silly nickname we call ourselves), and we can help you out. Other great resources include our mailing list, the /r/rust subreddit, and Stack Overflow.
Now that you have Rust installed, let‘s write your first Rust program. It’s traditional to make your first program in any new language one that prints the text “Hello, world!” to the screen. The nice thing about starting with such a simple program is that you can verify that your compiler isn't just installed, but also working properly. And printing information to the screen is a pretty common thing to do.
The first thing that we need to do is make a file to put our code in. I like to make a projects directory in my home directory, and keep all my projects there. Rust does not care where your code lives.
This actually leads to one other concern we should address: this tutorial will assume that you have basic familiarity with the command-line. Rust does not require that you know a whole ton about the command line, but until the language is in a more finished state, IDE support is spotty. Rust makes no specific demands on your editing tooling, or where your code lives.
With that said, let's make a directory in our projects directory.
$ mkdir ~/projects $ cd ~/projects $ mkdir hello_world $ cd hello_world
If you're on Windows and not using PowerShell, the ~ may not work. Consult the documentation for your shell for more details.
Let‘s make a new source file next. I’m going to use the syntax editor filename to represent editing a file in these examples, but you should use whatever method you want. We'll call our file hello_world.rs:
$ editor hello_world.rs
Rust files always end in a .rs extension. If you're using more than one word in your file name, use an underscore. hello_world.rs versus goodbye.rs.
Now that you've got your file open, type this in:
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world");
}
Save the file, and then type this into your terminal window:
$ rustc hello_world.rs $ ./hello_world # just 'hello_world' on Windows Hello, world
Success! Let's go over what just happened in detail.
fn main() {
}
These two lines define a function in Rust. The main function is special: it‘s the beginning of every Rust program. The first line says "I’m declaring a function named main, which takes no arguments and returns nothing." If there were arguments, they would go inside the parentheses (( and )), and because we aren‘t returning anything from this function, we’ve dropped that notation entirely. We'll get to it later.
You'll also note that the function is wrapped in curly braces ({ and }). Rust requires these around all function bodies. It is also considered good style to put the opening curly brace on the same line as the function declaration, with one space in between.
Next up is this line:
println!("Hello, world");
This line does all of the work in our little program. There are a number of details that are important here. The first is that it's indented with four spaces, not tabs. Please configure your editor of choice to insert four spaces with the tab key. We provide some sample configurations for various editors here.
The second point is the println!() part. This is calling a Rust macro, which is how metaprogramming is done in Rust. If it were a function instead, it would look like this: println(). For our purposes, we don‘t need to worry about this difference. Just know that sometimes, you’ll see a !, and that means that you‘re calling a macro instead of a normal function. One last thing to mention: Rust’s macros are significantly different than C macros, if you‘ve used those. Don’t be scared of using macros. We‘ll get to the details eventually, you’ll just have to trust us for now.
Next, "Hello, world" is a string. Strings are a surprisingly complicated topic in a systems programming language, and this is a statically allocated string. We will talk more about different kinds of allocation later. We pass this string as an argument to println!, which prints the string to the screen. Easy enough!
Finally, the line ends with a semicolon (;). Rust is an expression oriented language, which means that most things are expressions. The ; is used to indicate that this expression is over, and the next one is ready to begin. Most lines of Rust code end with a ;. We will cover this in-depth later in the tutorial.
Finally, actually compiling and running our program. We can compile with our compiler, rustc, by passing it the name of our source file:
$ rustc hello_world.rs
This is similar to gcc or clang, if you come from a C or C++ background. Rust will output a binary executable. You can see it with ls:
$ ls hello_world hello_world.rs
Or on Windows:
$ dir hello_world.exe hello_world.rs
There are now two files: our source code, with the .rs extension, and the executable (hello_world.exe on Windows, hello_world everywhere else)
$ ./hello_world # or ./hello_world.exe on Windows
This prints out our Hello, world! text to our terminal.
If you come from a dynamically typed language like Ruby, Python, or JavaScript, you may not be used to these two steps being separate. Rust is an ahead-of-time compiled language, which means that you can compile a program, give it to someone else, and they don't need to have Rust installed. If you give someone a .rb or .py or .js file, they need to have Ruby/Python/JavaScript installed, but you just need one command to both compile and run your program. Everything is a tradeoff in language design, and Rust has made its choice.
Congratulations! You have officially written a Rust program. That makes you a Rust programmer! Welcome.
Next, I‘d like to introduce you to another tool, Cargo, which is used to write real-world Rust programs. Just using rustc is nice for simple things, but as your project grows, you’ll want something to help you manage all of the options that it has, and to make it easy to share your code with other people and projects.
Cargo is a tool that Rustaceans use to help manage their Rust projects. Cargo is currently in an alpha state, just like Rust, and so it is still a work in progress. However, it is already good enough to use for many Rust projects, and so it is assumed that Rust projects will use Cargo from the beginning.
Programmers love car analogies, so I‘ve got a good one for you to think about the relationship between cargo and rustc: rustc is like a car, and cargo is like a robotic driver. You can drive your car yourself, of course, but isn’t it just easier to let a computer drive it for you?
Anyway, Cargo manages three things: building your code, downloading the dependencies your code needs, and building the dependencies your code needs. At first, your program doesn‘t have any dependencies, so we’ll only be using the first part of its functionality. Eventually, we‘ll add more. Since we started off by using Cargo, it’ll be easy to add later.
Let's convert Hello World to Cargo. The first thing we need to do is install it. To do this, we need to build it from source. There are no binaries yet.
First, let‘s go back to our projects directory. We don’t want Cargo to live in our project!
$ cd ..
Next, we need these commands:
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo $ cd cargo $ make $ make install # may need sudo or admin permissions
The --recursive downloads Cargo‘s own dependencies. You can’t use Cargo to fetch dependencies until you have Cargo installed! Also, you will need to have git installed. Much of the Rust world assumes git usage, so it's a good thing to have around. Please check out the git documentation for more on installing git.
We hope to give Cargo a binary installer, similar to Rust's own, so that this will not be necessary in the future.
Let's see if that worked. Try this:
$ cargo Commands: build # compile the current project Options (for all commands): -v, [--verbose] -h, [--help]
If you see this output when you run cargo, congrats! Cargo is working. If not, please open an issue or drop by the Rust IRC, and we can help you out.
Let's move back into our hello_world directory now:
$ cd .. # move back up into projects $ cd hello_world # move into hello_world
To Cargo-ify our project, we need to do two things: Make a Cargo.toml configuration file, and put our source file in the right place. Let's do that part first:
$ mkdir src $ mv hello_world.rs src/hello_world.rs
Cargo expects your source files to live inside a src directory. That leaves the top level for other things, like READMEs, licence information, and anything not related to your code. Cargo helps us keep our projects nice and tidy. A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Next, our configuration file:
$ editor Cargo.toml
Make sure to get this name right: you need the capital C!
Put this inside:
[package] name = "hello_world" version = "0.1.0" authors = [ "someone@example.com" ] [[bin]] name = "hello_world"
This file is in the TOML format. Let's let it explain itself to you:
TOML aims to be a minimal configuration file format that's easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.
TOML is very similar to INI, but with some extra goodies.
Anyway, there are two tables in this file: package and bin. The first tells Cargo metadata about your package. The second tells Cargo that we're interested in building a binary, not a library (though we could do both!), as well as what it is named.
Once you have this file in place, we should be ready to build! Try this:
$ cargo build Compiling hello_world v0.1.0 (file:/home/yourname/projects/hello_world) $ ./target/hello_world Hello, world!
Bam! We build our project with cargo build, and run it with ./target/hello_world. This hasn‘t bought us a whole lot over our simple use of rustc, but think about the future: when our project has more than one file, we would need to call rustc twice, and pass it a bunch of options to tell it to build everything together. With Cargo, as our project grows, we can just cargo build and it’ll work the right way.
That‘s it! We’ve successfully built hello_world with Cargo. Even though our program is simple, it‘s using much of the real tooling that you’ll use for the rest of your Rust career.
Next, we'll learn more about Rust itself, by starting to write a more complicated program. We hope you want to do more with Rust than just print “Hello, world!”
return
comments
attributes
stability markers
visibility
Tuples
Structs
Enums
for
while
loop
break/continue
iterators
Move vs. Copy
Allocation