Getting Started page fails to mention build-essential package for Linux

[AugLuk]

What needs to be fixed?

The Getting Started guide fails to mention needing to install the build-essential package for Linux. Following the guide and then trying to compile a file using "rustc foobar.rs" produces an error if the package is not installed. This would be acceptable if the error message given by rustc was more helpful. The error message looks cryptic to a beginner and doesn't provide any information on what is causing the problem or how to resolve it. See https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i4jlbi/linking_with_cc_failed_exit_code_1/ for an example. I'm not sure if this issue should be filled under the website or rustc. A similar issue is at #1012 but this is a more general problem and not restricted to WSL.

Page(s) Affected

https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started

[Manishearth]

@kinnison i was under the impression we ship self contained linkers and stuff? Or otherwise don't need build-essential typically.

[kinnison]

AIUI, by default we use system linkers, certainly the llvm-tools component is not part of default, and on Windows we generally rely on the mingw or msvc linkers to be present. I have been considering doing a test compile if you install a toolchain with cargo and rustc as part of toolchain installation, so that rustup can warn you if hello world can't build, but that wouldn't fix the website.

Deciding which packages to recommend is very hard because they vary in name between platforms though.

[Manishearth]

Sounds good, we might need to make a note of this on the website (maybe on the rustup website?). If someone could investigate the exact details needed on different platforms that would be great.

[kinnison]

Eventually I'd like for the rustup website to go away and merge into the rust-lang main website because it's silly to have a separate page when we have https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install so I'd suggest we focus on getting that page up-to-scratch and then consider just redirecting https://rustup.rs/ to there

[senekor]

This is still an issue (tested in VM). I believe it is appropriate for the install page to mention this if rustup doesn't handle it automatically. (it currently doesn't)

I suppose build-essential is the package for Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives. I'm on Fedora, installing gcc does the trick for me.

A relatively straight-forward fix could be to test in a couple VMs for popular distros, then just put the list of different install commands on the website. For users who are not sure what distro they are using, we might suggest the Ubuntu install command as a heuristic.

[senekor]

Maybe this problem will solve itself once the stable toolchain uses rust-lld by default:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/05/17/enabling-rust-lld-on-linux.html