Learning about RUST

Getting started

• Installed RUST using rustup. rustup is the tool to install and manage RUST tool chains
• RUST metadata and toolchains installed at $HOME/.rustup/
• cargo is the official package manager for rust, installed at $HOME/.cargo/. All commands and binaries are added to $HOME/.cargo/bin
• List of commands after the rust installation. rustc to compile and generate the executable

✗ ls $HOME/.cargo/bin 
cargo         cargo-fmt     clippy-driver rust-analyzer rust-gdbgui   rustc         rustfmt
cargo-clippy  cargo-miri    rls           rust-gdb      rust-lldb     rustdoc       rustup

Rust by Example

Starting from rust-by-example

Rust is a modern systems programming language focusing on safety, speed, and concurrency. It accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection.

• Interesting to see that memory safety ensure without using garbage collection? - don't know how it is done.

Hello, World

Added a hello world program. Some observations.

• program begins with main()
• functions declared with fn keyword
• statements end with ;
• variables and functions are named in snake case
• println! is a macro from std::fmt module
• supports line comments (// ) and block level comments (/*...*/)
• No inclusion of module or header for the hello world program. How macros from std::fmt are imported?

Primitives

• Integer types, default i32. types can be expressed by default or using suffix
• interesting to see some rust specific nuances that I haven't seen before in the languages I used
  • variables are immutable by default. To declare a mutable variable, use mut keyword
  • variables can be re-declared in the same scope with same or different type (called shadowing in rust context)
  • numbers can be expressed with _ for better readability. Compiler ignores _.
• {:?} - enables debug formatting of a type