Hello World

About This Course

• We will learn to program in Rust

  • Work through a textbook
  • Write weekly homeworks
  • Everyone: Write a 1000-line project
  • Grads: Write a 5-page research paper

• Goal: leave as competent Rust programmer (course objectives in syllabus)

About Rust

• Rust is a "systems programming language" intended as a replacement for C/C++

• Rust offers a unique type system that allows static automatic memory management: mallocs and frees can be inserted by the program as needed

  • The automatic memory management constraints make writing Rust programs harder than one might expect

• Rust provides safety guarantees against common types of error. It also provides an "unsafe" mode to escape some of these guarantees when needed

• Rust programs tend to have similar performance to C programs, similar readability to C++ programs, be harder to write than either, and to be reliable and safe

• Concurrency and functional programming features are first-class in Rust

• Nice module and separate compilation system with package manager

Installing Rust

• Install rustup tool

  curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
  rustup component rustfmt add
  rustup component clippy add
  

• Now you have access to nightly, beta and stable builds for arbitrary platforms

Hello World In Rust

• Initialize Cargo project

  cargo init --bin
  

• Edit provided program

• Build and run program

  cargo build
  cargo run
  

Rust Testing

• Built-in (OK) support for unit tests integrated with language and Cargo

• Can express positive and negative tests, conditional tests

Rust Program Documentation

• Integrated doc comments as expected

• Neat feature: doc tests

• Integrated with Cargo

• Works better with libraries than binaries

Rust Language Documentation

• The course textbook

• Other books (?)

• "The Rust Book" online (second edition, mostly)

• The API docs

Book Example: GCD

• Simple command-line app

• Your homework: extend it to do more things.