Starting with Rust - Compile Hello world

This post is the first part of my Rust programming series. (See the labels.) I will use Windows 10 but everything sould work on other platforms, too. The main goal of this series is not to create a new Rust tutorial (I couldn't do better than this), but to help you to setup your environment, give you a quick introduction into the language with a robust programming knowledge and show you the main ideas, weakness and advantages of this language.

In the fist post of this series I will show you how you can write a simple Hello World program in Rust and how to setup the Visual Studio Code for code editing.

First, we could download the Rust compiler from its page (https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install), but we won't. We will use the rustup command. I won't explain it in details, please, check the link. Under Linux, don't forget to run the command source $HOME/.cargo/env, too.

After the install, you can run the following programs from cmd:

The compiler is the rustc.exe. After the compiler is installed, we have to create a new file called main.rs. (It is recommended to create it inside a folder called helloworld.) The file has to contain our first, classic, "hello world" program:

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

We can compile the file with the

rustc main.rs

command, and get the main (or main.exe) file. (Of course, you can run it if you want and and you can see the longly awaited "Hello world" message on the console.)

Rust is quite self-explanatory in this level, I won't analize this code. It's more important to setup a GUI and continue the learning there. In this tutorial, I will use Visual Studio Code, which is a generic-purpose cross-platform environment.

After installing Visual Studio Code (VSC), we can open the previously created folder where the main.rs file can be found.

VSC recognizes Rust out-of-the-box, it can color the source code.

Coloring is good and useful, but VSC can do much more for us, if we install the Rust plugin. (It should install rust-analyzer or RLS as a dependency. If it won't, you should install one of them manually.)

Now, we can compile and run a simple Rust program in console and we can edit it in Visual Studio Code with a Language Server. In the next part, we will use cargo to generate a new project, compile it and we will use VSC to debug our code.