Rust Note 001 Setup Your Work Environment

download rustup-init.exe and execute it

execute the following command from a shell If you don’t like to send unknown scripts in your shell, you can download for your platform from here

Rust runs on a very large group of platforms, including “embedded” chipsets, i.e. without an operating system. The toolchain is capable of doing some cross-platform compilation if paired with the correct c compiler and linker – but this topic is too complex for this post the paltform triple include:

• the stability of the toolchain (stable, nightly)
• the hardware architecture (arm, intel 64 bit, …)
• the os
• the ABI backend when necessary (like the three musketeers who where actually four)

here are some target identifiers examples, a complete updated list is here

stability	hardware	os	ABI	target identifier
stable	64-bit Intel	Windows	Microsoft VS	x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
stable	64-bit Intel	Windows	MingW GCC	x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
stable	64-bit Intel	Linux	GCC	x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
stable	64-bit ARM	Linux	GCC	aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

the toolchain is composed of several pieces; we already mentioned rustup (which will be useful also to keep your rust installation updated) but we must get to know

• rustc : the actual rust compiler and
• cargo : project / package / dependencies manager

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash While it is entirely possible to develop in rust just using rustc, cargo is a really convenient command line application which allows to:

• set up define and manage projects
• identify and download all necessary packages
• define different compilation profiles
• also cross-compile for different platform.

Let’s introduce some terminology here: rust minimal compilation element is called module : each file can define a module; one or more modules are usually grouped into packages which offer a coherent functionalities; these are called crates Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash cargo uses a TOML formatted configuration file in the root directory of the project, which is called Cargo.toml

Let’s use cargo to define our first project: this will create all basic directories and files under a newly created ’hello’ directory; by default this will be generate a single binary Under the src directory we can find our main entry point (main.rs) which does exactly what you think. You can compile and execute it with the following command

for every platform:

pacman -S vscode

• rust-analyzer: (site) as of today (October 15th, 2023) this is the best Language Server available for Rust
  • provides code highlighting, completion and type hints
• Better TOML: useful to edit files like Cargo.toml which include all details about your project
• CodeLLDB: debugger
• Crates: allows you get the available versions of each crate just hovering on the dependencies secion of your Cargo.toml
• Error Lens: help read error in lines easily

this installation setup suggestion is one of the best advice I found for new programmers. I have to admit that my favrite tool for the job is Emacs, but I will add some configuration setup hint here as soon as I’m able to have the same level of features described above.