This first chapter of the book will get us going with Rust and its tooling. First, we’ll install Rust. Then, the classic ‘Hello World’ program. Finally, we’ll talk about Cargo, Rust’s build system and package manager.

We’ll be showing off a number of commands using a terminal, and those lines all start with $. You don't need to type in the $s, they are there to indicate the start of each command. We’ll see many tutorials and examples around the web that follow this convention: $ for commands run as our regular user, and # for commands we should be running as an administrator.

The first step to using Rust is to install it. Generally speaking, you’ll need an Internet connection to run the commands in this section, as we’ll be downloading Rust from the Internet.

The Rust compiler runs on, and compiles to, a great number of platforms, but is best supported on Linux, Mac, and Windows, on the x86 and x86-64 CPU architecture. There are official builds of the Rust compiler and standard library for these platforms and more. For full details on Rust platform support see the website.

All you need to do on Unix systems like Linux and macOS is open a terminal and type this:

$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

It will download a script, and start the installation. If everything goes well, you’ll see this appear:

Rust is installed now. Great! 

Installing on Windows is nearly as easy: download and run rustup-init.exe. It will start the installation in a console and present the above message on success.

For other installation options and information, visit the install page of the Rust website.

Uninstalling Rust is as easy as installing it:

$ rustup self uninstall

If we've got Rust installed, we can open up a shell, and type this:

$ rustc --version

You should see the version number, commit hash, and commit date.

If you do, Rust has been installed successfully! Congrats!

If you don't, that probably means that the PATH environment variable doesn't include Cargo's binary directory, ~/.cargo/bin on Unix, or %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin on Windows. This is the directory where Rust development tools live, and most Rust developers keep it in their PATH environment variable, which makes it possible to run rustc on the command line. Due to differences in operating systems, command shells, and bugs in installation, you may need to restart your shell, log out of the system, or configure PATH manually as appropriate for your operating environment.

Rust does not do its own linking, and so you’ll need to have a linker installed. Doing so will depend on your specific system. For Linux-based systems, Rust will attempt to call cc for linking. On windows-msvc (Rust built on Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio), this depends on having Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools installed. These do not need to be in %PATH% as rustc will find them automatically. In general, if you have your linker in a non-traditional location you can call rustc linker=/path/to/cc, where /path/to/cc should point to your linker path.

If you are still stuck, there are a number of places where we can get help. The easiest is the #rust-beginners IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org and for general discussion the #rust IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org, which we can access through Mibbit. Then we'll be chatting with other Rustaceans (a silly nickname we call ourselves) who can help us out. Other great resources include the user’s forum and Stack Overflow.

This installer also installs a copy of the documentation locally, so we can read it offline. It's only a rustup doc away!

Now that you have Rust installed, we'll help you write your first Rust program. It's traditional when learning a new language to write a little program to print the text “Hello, world!” to the screen, and in this section, we'll follow that tradition.

The nice thing about starting with such a simple program is that you can quickly verify that your compiler is installed, and that it's working properly. Printing information to the screen is also a pretty common thing to do, so practicing it early on is good.

Note: This book assumes basic familiarity with the command line. Rust itself makes no specific demands about your editing, tooling, or where your code lives, so if you prefer an IDE to the command line, that's an option. You may want to check out SolidOak, which was built specifically with Rust in mind. There are a number of extensions in development by the community, and the Rust team ships plugins for various editors. Configuring your editor or IDE is out of the scope of this tutorial, so check the documentation for your specific setup.

First, make a file to put your Rust code in. Rust doesn't care where your code lives, but for this book, I suggest making a projects directory in your home directory, and keeping all your projects there. Open a terminal and enter the following commands to make a directory for this particular project:

$ mkdir ~/projects
$ cd ~/projects
$ mkdir hello_world
$ cd hello_world

Note: If you’re on Windows and not using PowerShell, the ~ may not work. Consult the documentation for your shell for more details.

We need to create a source file for our Rust program. Rust files always end in a .rs extension. If you are using more than one word in your filename, use an underscore to separate them; for example, you would use my_program.rs rather than myprogram.rs.

Now, make a new file and call it main.rs. Open the file and type the following code:

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

Save the file, and go back to your terminal window. On Linux or macOS, enter the following commands:

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

In Windows, replace main with main.exe. Regardless of your operating system, you should see the string Hello, world! print to the terminal. If you did, then congratulations! You've officially written a Rust program. That makes you a Rust programmer! Welcome.

Now, let’s go over what just happened in your "Hello, world!" program in detail. Here's the first piece of the puzzle:

fn main() {

}

These 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 that 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 can omit the return type entirely.

Also note that the function body is wrapped in curly braces ({ and }). Rust requires these around all function bodies. It's considered good style to put the opening curly brace on the same line as the function declaration, with one space in between.

Inside the main() function:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
#}

This line does all of the work in this little program: it prints text to the screen. There are a number of details that are important here. The first is that it’s indented with four spaces, not tabs.

The second important part is the println!() line. This is calling a Rust macro, which is how metaprogramming is done in Rust. If it were calling a function instead, it would look like this: println() (without the !). We'll discuss Rust macros in more detail later, but for now you only need to know that when you see a ! that means that you’re calling a macro instead of a normal function.

Next is "Hello, world!" which is a string. Strings are a surprisingly complicated topic in a systems programming language, and this is a statically allocated string. We pass this string as an argument to println!, which prints the string to the screen. Easy enough!

The line ends with a semicolon (;). Rust is an expression-oriented language, which means that most things are expressions, rather than statements. The ; indicates that this expression is over, and the next one is ready to begin. Most lines of Rust code end with a ;.

In "Writing and Running a Rust Program", we showed you how to run a newly created program. We'll break that process down and examine each step now.

Before running a Rust program, you have to compile it. You can use the Rust compiler by entering the rustc command and passing it the name of your source file, like this:

$ rustc main.rs

If you come from a C or C++ background, you'll notice that this is similar to gcc or clang. After compiling successfully, Rust should output a binary executable, which you can see on Linux or macOS by entering the ls command in your shell as follows:

$ ls
main  main.rs

On Windows, you'd enter:

$ dir
main.exe
main.rs

This shows we have two files: the source code, with an .rs extension, and the executable (main.exe on Windows, main everywhere else). All that's left to do from here is run the main or main.exe file, like this:

$ ./main  # or .\main.exe on Windows

If main.rs were your "Hello, world!" program, this would print Hello, world! to your terminal.

If you come from a dynamic language like Ruby, Python, or JavaScript, you may not be used to compiling and running a program being separate steps. Rust is an ahead-of-time compiled language, which means that you can compile a program, give it to someone else, and they can run it even without Rust installed. If you give someone a .rb or .py or .js file, on the other hand, they need to have a Ruby, Python, or JavaScript implementation installed (respectively), but you only need one command to both compile and run your program. Everything is a tradeoff in language design.

Just compiling with rustc is fine for simple programs, but as your project grows, you'll want to be able to manage all of the options your project has, and make it easy to share your code with other people and projects. Next, I'll introduce you to a tool called Cargo, which will help you write real-world Rust programs.

Cargo is Rust’s build system and package manager, and Rustaceans use Cargo to manage their Rust projects. Cargo manages three things: building your code, downloading the libraries your code depends on, and building those libraries. We call libraries your code needs ‘dependencies’ since your code depends on them.

The simplest Rust programs don’t have any dependencies, so right now, you'd only use the first part of its functionality. As you write more complex Rust programs, you’ll want to add dependencies, and if you start off using Cargo, that will be a lot easier to do.

As the vast, vast majority of Rust projects use Cargo, we will assume that you’re using it for the rest of the book. Cargo comes installed with Rust itself, if you used the official installers. If you installed Rust through some other means, you can check if you have Cargo installed by typing:

$ cargo --version

Into a terminal. If you see a version number, great! If you see an error like ‘command not found’, then you should look at the documentation for the system in which you installed Rust, to determine if Cargo is separate.

Let’s convert the Hello World program to Cargo. To Cargo-fy a project, you need to do three things:

1. Put your source file in the right directory.
2. Get rid of the old executable (main.exe on Windows, main everywhere else).
3. Make a Cargo configuration file.

Let's get started!

First, go back to your terminal, move to your hello_world directory, and enter the following commands:

$ mkdir src
$ mv main.rs src/main.rs # or 'move main.rs src/main.rs' on Windows
$ rm main  # or 'del main.exe' on Windows

Cargo expects your source files to live inside a src directory, so do that first. This leaves the top-level project directory (in this case, hello_world) for READMEs, license information, and anything else not related to your code. In this way, using Cargo helps you keep your projects nice and tidy. There's a place for everything, and everything is in its place.

Now, move main.rs into the src directory, and delete the compiled file you created with rustc. As usual, replace main with main.exe if you're on Windows.

This example retains main.rs as the source filename because it's creating an executable. If you wanted to make a library instead, you'd name the file lib.rs. This convention is used by Cargo to successfully compile your projects, but it can be overridden if you wish.

Next, create a new file inside your hello_world directory, and call it Cargo.toml.

Make sure to capitalize the C in Cargo.toml, or Cargo won't know what to do with the configuration file.

This file is in the TOML (Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language) format. TOML is similar to INI, but has some extra goodies, and is used as Cargo’s configuration format.

Inside this file, type the following information:

[package]

name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"
authors = [ "Your name <you@example.com>" ]

The first line, [package], indicates that the following statements are configuring a package. As we add more information to this file, we’ll add other sections, but for now, we only have the package configuration.

The other three lines set the three bits of configuration that Cargo needs to know to compile your program: its name, what version it is, and who wrote it.

Once you've added this information to the Cargo.toml file, save it to finish creating the configuration file.

With your Cargo.toml file in place in your project's root directory, you should be ready to build and run your Hello World program! To do so, enter the following commands:

$ cargo build
   Compiling hello_world v0.0.1 (file:///home/yourname/projects/hello_world)
$ ./target/debug/hello_world
Hello, world!

Bam! If all goes well, Hello, world! should print to the terminal once more.

You just built a project with cargo build and ran it with ./target/debug/hello_world, but you can actually do both in one step with cargo run as follows:

$ cargo run
     Running `target/debug/hello_world`
Hello, world!

The run command comes in handy when you need to rapidly iterate on a project.

Notice that this example didn’t re-build the project. Cargo figured out that the file hasn’t changed, and so it just ran the binary. If you'd modified your source code, Cargo would have rebuilt the project before running it, and you would have seen something like this:

$ cargo run
   Compiling hello_world v0.0.1 (file:///home/yourname/projects/hello_world)
     Running `target/debug/hello_world`
Hello, world!

Cargo checks to see if any of your project’s files have been modified, and only rebuilds your project if they’ve changed since the last time you built it.

With simple projects, Cargo doesn't bring a whole lot over just using rustc, but it will become useful in the future. This is especially true when you start using crates; these are synonymous with a ‘library’ or ‘package’ in other programming languages. For complex projects composed of multiple crates, it’s much easier to let Cargo coordinate the build. Using Cargo, you can run cargo build, and it should work the right way.

When your project is ready for release, you can use cargo build --release to compile your project with optimizations. These optimizations make your Rust code run faster, but turning them on makes your program take longer to compile. This is why there are two different profiles, one for development, and one for building the final program you’ll give to a user.

Running cargo build also causes Cargo to create a new file called Cargo.lock, which looks like this:

[root]
name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"

Cargo uses the Cargo.lock file to keep track of dependencies in your application. This is the Hello World project's Cargo.lock file. This project doesn't have dependencies, so the file is a bit sparse. Realistically, you won't ever need to touch this file yourself; just let Cargo handle it.

That’s it! If you've been following along, you should have successfully built hello_world with Cargo.

Even though the project is simple, it now uses much of the real tooling you’ll use for the rest of your Rust career. In fact, you can expect to start virtually all Rust projects with some variation on the following commands:

$ git clone someurl.com/foo
$ cd foo
$ cargo build

You don’t have to go through that previous process every time you want to start a new project! Cargo can quickly make a bare-bones project directory that you can start developing in right away.

To start a new project with Cargo, enter cargo new at the command line:

$ cargo new hello_world --bin

This command passes --bin because the goal is to get straight to making an executable application, as opposed to a library. Executables are often called binaries (as in /usr/bin, if you’re on a Unix system).

Cargo has generated two files and one directory for us: a Cargo.toml and a src directory with a main.rs file inside. These should look familiar, they’re exactly what we created by hand, above.

This output is all you need to get started. First, open Cargo.toml. It should look something like this:

[package]

name = "hello_world"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Your Name <you@example.com>"]

[dependencies]

Do not worry about the [dependencies] line, we will come back to it later.

Cargo has populated Cargo.toml with reasonable defaults based on the arguments you gave it and your git global configuration. You may notice that Cargo has also initialized the hello_world directory as a git repository.

Here’s what should be in src/main.rs:

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

Cargo has generated a "Hello World!" for you, and you’re ready to start coding!

Note: If you want to look at Cargo in more detail, check out the official Cargo guide, which covers all of its features.

This chapter covered the basics that will serve you well through the rest of this book, and the rest of your time with Rust. Now that you’ve got the tools down, we'll cover more about the Rust language itself.

You have two options: Dive into a project with ‘Tutorial: Guessing Game’, or start from the bottom and work your way up with ‘Syntax and Semantics’. More experienced systems programmers will probably prefer ‘Tutorial: Guessing Game’, while those from dynamic backgrounds may enjoy either. Different people learn differently! Choose whatever’s right for you.