Introduction to Rust

What is Rust?

Rust is a modern systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency. It was started at Mozilla Research and is now maintained by the Rust Foundation.

The Three Pillars of Rust

1. Safety: Rust prevents memory errors like buffer overflows and use-after-free at compile time.
2. Speed: Rust is as fast as C and C++ because it compiles to machine code and has no garbage collector.
3. Concurrency: Rust’s ownership rules make it impossible to have data races in multi-threaded code.

Setting Up Your Environment

1. Install Rust via rustup

The official way to install Rust is using rustup, a tool for managing Rust versions.

• Windows: Download and run rustup-init.exe.
• macOS/Linux: Run the following in your terminal:

  1	curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

2. Verify Installation

Open a new terminal and run:

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rustc --version
cargo --version

3. Editor Setup

We highly recommend Visual Studio Code with the rust-analyzer extension. It provides excellent autocompletion and inline error checking.

Meet Cargo: Rust’s Swiss Army Knife

cargo is Rust’s build system and package manager. You’ll use it for almost everything.

Your First Project

Let’s create a project named hello_rust.

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cargo new hello_rust
cd hello_rust

Look at the structure:

• Cargo.toml: Metadata and dependencies (like a package.json or requirements.txt).
• src/main.rs: Your Rust code.

Open src/main.rs:

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

Running the code

In your terminal, run:

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cargo run

You should see “Hello, Rustacean!” printed to the screen.

Summary

Today you learned:

• Why Rust is unique (Safety, Speed, Concurrency)
• How to install the Rust toolchain
• How to use Cargo to manage projects
• The structure of a basic Rust program

Practice Exercise

1. Change the message in main.rs to greet yourself.
2. Add a second println! statement.
3. Try running cargo check instead of cargo run. What’s the difference?

Next Steps

Tomorrow, we’ll dive into Variables and Mutability—and learn why everything in Rust is “locked” by default!