Introduction to Rust (2024)

Installing

rustup is an installer for the systems programming language Rust.

• Navigate to https://rustup.rs/
• Download rustup executable
• Run it to install rustc (compiler), cargo (package manager) and other dependencies.

In order to check that everything is set up correctly afterwards (current latest version is 1.76.0):

rustc --version

cargo --version

Learning resources

• The Book - The most comprehensive resource for learning Rust. Well written, with lots of example code.
• Rustlings - Exercises to go with the chapters of "the book". Put the learning material into practice.
• Rust By Example - Alternative to rustlings, available online.

IDE

• Visual studio code, with rust analyzer plugin.

OR

• IntelliJ, with IntelliJ rust plugin (may require license for the specific IDE you want to use, IntelliJ Rustrover, Idea or CLion)

OR

• Any editor of your choosing, which supports rust analyzer LSP (VIM etc.)

Vscode with rust analyzer plugin provides a good developer experience and can be a nice starting point, if you have no strong preference.

Fundamentals

A non-comprehensive, lightning course in rust syntax and language features. It is organized into three parts, following the structure of the slides. Part 1 and 2 cover relatively core concepts of the language, while part 3 shows of some concurrency concepts (optional).

Each part has a set of tests. Run cargo test within the fundamentals folder to run all the tests. To only run tests for a specific part, run cargo test part1, for example.

Rustlings

rustlings contains small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code. It is a rather comprehensive collection of exercises, taking you from let x = 5; all the way to concurrency primitives and macros.

(This project contains the rustlings git repository as a submodule. If you did not clone recursively, re-clone this repository using git clone --recurse-submodules.)

Installing the rustlings executable

The project comes with it's own executable, which helps with running the exercises. Install it by:

cd rustlings/
cargo install --force --path .

Enabling rust-analyzer (optional, but recommended)

Run the command rustlings lsp which will generate a rust-project.json at the root of the project, this allows rust-analyzer to parse each exercise.

Doing exercises

The exercises are sorted by topic and can be found in the subdirectory rustlings/exercises/<topic>. For every topic there is an additional README file with some resources to get you started on the topic. We really recommend that you have a look at them before you start.

The task is simple. Most exercises contain an error that keeps them from compiling, and it's up to you to fix it! Some exercises are also run as tests, but rustlings handles them all the same. To run the exercises in the recommended order, execute:

rustlings watch

This will try to verify the completion of every exercise in a predetermined order (what we think is best for newcomers). It will also rerun automatically every time you change a file in the exercises/ directory. If you want to only run it once, you can use:

For more commands, see rustlings README.