Introduction - hello world!

If you are using C or C++, it is probably because you have to - either you need low-level access to the system, or need every last drop of performance, or both. Rust aims to offer the same level of abstraction around memory, the same performance, but be safer and make you more productive.

Concretely, there are many languages out there that you might prefer to use to C++: Java, Scala, Haskell, Python, and so forth, but you can't because either the level of abstraction is too high (you don't get direct access to memory, you are forced to use garbage collection, etc.), or there are performance issues (either performance is unpredictable or it's simply not fast enough). Rust does not force you to use garbage collection, and as in C++, you get raw pointers to memory to play with. Rust subscribes to the 'pay for what you use' philosophy of C++. If you don't use a feature, then you don't pay any performance overhead for its existence. Furthermore, all language features in Rust have a predictable (and usually small) cost.

Whilst these constraints make Rust a (rare) viable alternative to C++, Rust also has benefits: it is memory safe - Rust's type system ensures that you don't get the kind of memory errors which are common in C++ - accessing un-initialised memory, and dangling pointers - all are impossible in Rust. Furthermore, whenever other constraints allow, Rust strives to prevent other safety issues too - for example, all array indexing is bounds checked (of course, if you want to avoid the cost, you can (at the expense of safety) - Rust allows you to do this in unsafe blocks, along with many other unsafe things. Crucially, Rust ensures that unsafety in unsafe blocks stays in unsafe blocks and can't affect the rest of your program). Finally, Rust takes many concepts from modern programming languages and introduces them to the systems language space. Hopefully, that makes programming in Rust more productive, efficient, and enjoyable.

In the rest of this section we'll download and install Rust, create a minimal Cargo project, and implement Hello World.

Getting Rust

You can get Rust from http://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install. The downloads from there include the Rust compiler, standard libraries, and Cargo, which is a package manager and build tool for Rust.

Rust is available on three channels: stable, beta, and nightly. Rust works on a rapid-release, schedule with new releases every six weeks. On the release date, nightly becomes beta and beta becomes stable.

Nightly is updated every night and is ideal for users who want to experiment with cutting edge features and ensure that their libraries will work with future Rust.

Stable is the right choice for most users. Rust's stability guarantees only apply to the stable channel.

Beta is designed to mostly be used in users' CI to check that their code will continue to work as expected.

So, you probably want the stable channel. If you're on Linux or OS X, the easiest way to get it is to run

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

On Windows, a similarly easy way would be to run

choco install rust

For other ways to install, see http://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.

You can find the source at github.com/rust-lang/rust. To build the compiler, run ./configure && make rustc. See building-from-source for more detailed instructions.

Hello World!

The easiest and most common way to build Rust programs is to use Cargo. To start a project called hello using Cargo, run cargo new --bin hello. This will create a new directory called hello inside which is a Cargo.toml file and a src directory with a file called main.rs.

Cargo.toml defines dependencies and other metadata about our project. We'll come back to it in detail later.

All our source code will go in the src directory. main.rs already contains a Hello World program. It looks like this:

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

To build the program, run cargo build. To build and run it, cargo run. If you do the latter, you should be greeted in the console. Success!

Cargo will have made a target directory and put the executable in there.

If you want to use the compiler directly you can run rustc src/main.rs which will create an executable called main. See rustc --help for lots of options.

OK, back to the code. A few interesting points - we use fn to define a function or method. main() is the default entry point for our programs (we'll leave program args for later). There are no separate declarations or header files as with C++. println! is Rust's equivalent of printf. The ! means that it is a macro. A subset of the standard library is available without needing to be explicitly imported/included (the prelude). The println! macro is included as part of that subset.

Let's change our example a little bit:

fn main() {
    let world = "world";
    println!("Hello {}!", world);
}

let is used to introduce a variable, world is the variable name and it is a string (technically the type is &'static str, but more on that later). We don't need to specify the type, it will be inferred for us.

Using {} in the println! statement is like using %s in printf. In fact, it is a bit more general than that because Rust will try to convert the variable to a string if it is not one already¹ (like operator<<() in C++). You can easily play around with this sort of thing - try multiple strings and using numbers (integer and float literals will work).

If you like, you can explicitly give the type of world:

let world: &'static str = "world";

In C++ we write T x to declare a variable x with type T. In Rust we write x: T, whether in let statements or function signatures, etc. Mostly we omit explicit types in let statements, but they are required for function arguments. Let's add another function to see it work:

fn foo(_x: &'static str) -> &'static str {
    "world"
}

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

The function foo has a single argument _x which is a string literal (we pass it "bar" from main)².

The return type for a function is given after ->. If the function doesn't return anything (a void function in C++), we don't need to give a return type at all (as in main). If you want to be super-explicit, you can write -> (), () is the void type in Rust.

You don't need the return keyword in Rust, if the last expression in a function body (or any other block, we'll see more of this later) is not finished with a semicolon, then it is the return value. So foo will return "world". The return keyword still exists so we can do early returns. You can replace "world" with return "world"; and it will have the same effect.

Why?

I would like to motivate some of the language features above. Local type inference is convenient and useful without sacrificing safety or performance (it's even in modern versions of C++ now). A minor convenience is that language items are consistently denoted by keyword (fn, let, etc.), this makes scanning by eye or by tools easier, in general the syntax of Rust is simpler and more consistent than C++. The println! macro is safer than printf - the number of arguments is statically checked against the number of 'holes' in the string and the arguments are type checked. This means you can't make the printf mistakes of printing memory as if it had a different type or addressing memory further down the stack by mistake. These are fairly minor things, but I hope they illustrate the philosophy behind the design of Rust.

Footnotes

This is a programmer specified conversion which uses the Display trait, which works a bit like toString in Java. You can also use {:?} which gives a compiler generated representation which is sometimes useful for debugging. As with printf, there are many other options. ↩
We don't actually use that argument in foo. Usually, Rust will warn us about this. By prefixing the argument name with _ we avoid these warnings. In fact, we don't need to name the argument at all, we could just use _. ↩

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