Rust Introduction

Rust is a fast, safe programming language for building reliable software.

What is Rust?

• Rust started at Mozilla and version 1.0 was released in 2015
• It is a compiled language: code becomes a fast program file
• It has no garbage collector, yet it manages memory safely
• It is now used by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Cloudflare and many others

Where is Rust Used?

Installing Rust

1. Visit rust-lang.org and follow the steps to install rustup.
2. Open a new terminal and check the version:

rustc --version
cargo --version

rustc is the compiler. Cargo is Rust's build tool and package manager. You will use Cargo almost all the time.

Creating a Project with Cargo

cargo new hello
cd hello
cargo run

cargo new creates a folder with a Cargo.toml file (project settings) and src/main.rs (your code). cargo run builds and runs the program.

Your First Program

Open src/main.rs:

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

Hello, Workownix!

The example explained

Printing Values

Use {} as a placeholder inside the text. Values fill the placeholders in order. You can also write a variable's name inside the braces.

fn main() {
    let name = "Ayesha";
    let age = 21;
    println!("{} is {} years old", name, age);
    println!("{name} studies at Workownix");
    print!("Same ");
    print!("line\n");
    println!("{:?}", (1, 2, 3));
}

Ayesha is 21 years old
Ayesha studies at Workownix
Same line
(1, 2, 3)

• print! does not add a new line.
• {:?} is the debug format, useful for printing tuples, arrays and other groups of values.

Comments

// A line comment
/* A block comment */
/// A documentation comment, used above functions

Exercise