Installing Rust and Hello World

Exploring Rust Part 1

Where to Find Information About Rust

To install Rust, check out the instructions at

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

Currently you can install Rust on the Mac using

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

and on Windows using the installer found at here or check the page on “Other installation methods” linked to from the getting started page.

Installing on Mac

I found the installation on the Mac nearly completely painless. All I had to do was paste the command into a terminal and hit the return key a few times. Then, I had to add the directory cargo/bin, which the installation had created in my home directory, to the PATH environment variable. This can be done by doing source .profile since the installer created a .profile file.

For some reason .profile wasn’t loading automatically when I started a shell, so I added that to .zshrc, since I’m using z-shell.

Installing on Windows

On Windows the installation only involved running the installer, and I didn’t have to manually fix the PATH.

Creating a Rust Program

I plan to use Visual Studio Code for my editor (it’s free) so I installed that, set the working folder to a new folder, then clicked the extensions button and installed the first extension that came up when I searched for “Rust”.

Following this, I decided to read The Rust Programming Language. But don’t worry; whatever I learn there or elsewhere I’m going to document in the following posts.

This online book suggests writing a “hello world” program, so I created a file called main.rs and typed this code into it

Note, there is an exclamation mark after println and that line ends in a semi-colon.

When I restarted VSCode on the Mac it insisted I update the extension I’d just installed, so I did that too.

To run it, although the extension I’d installed seemed to do syntax highlighting just fine, I couldn’t spot a run button, so I opened a terminal from the terminal menu in VS Code and typed rustc main.rs.

Finally I was able to run rustc, and it created a file called main, which I ran using ./main in the terminal. Success!