The Rust Programming Language

Now that you have Rust installed, let’s write your first Rust program. It’s traditional when learning a new language to write a little program to print the text “Hello, world!” to the screen, so we’ll do the same here!

Note: This book assumes basic familiarity with the command line. Rust itself makes no specific demands about your editing, tooling, or where your code lives, so if you prefer an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to the command line, feel free to use your favorite IDE. Many IDEs now have some degree of Rust support; check the IDE’s documentation for details. Enabling great IDE support has been a recent focus of the Rust team, and progress has been made rapidly on that front!

First, make a directory to put your Rust code in. Rust doesn’t care where your code lives, but for the exercises and projects in this book, we’d suggest making a projects directory in your home directory and keeping all your projects there.

Open a terminal and enter the following commands to make a projects directory and, inside that, a directory for this “Hello, world!” project:

Linux and Mac:

$ mkdir ~/projects
$ cd ~/projects
$ mkdir hello_world
$ cd hello_world

Windows CMD:

> mkdir "%USERPROFILE%\projects"
> cd /d "%USERPROFILE%\projects"
> mkdir hello_world
> cd hello_world

Windows PowerShell:

> mkdir $env:USERPROFILE\projects
> cd $env:USERPROFILE\projects
> mkdir hello_world
> cd hello_world

Next, make a new source file and call it main.rs---Rust files always end with the .rs extension. If you’re using more than one word in your filename, use an underscore to separate them. For example, you’d use hello_world.rs rather than helloworld.rs.

Now open the main.rs file you just created, and enter the code shown in Listing 1-1:

Filename: main.rs

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

Listing 1-1: A program that prints “Hello, world!”

Save the file, and go back to your terminal window. On Linux or macOS, enter the following commands to compile and run the file:

$ rustc main.rs
$ ./main
Hello, world!

On Windows, use .\main.exe instead of ./main.

> rustc main.rs
> .\main.exe
Hello, world!

Regardless of your operating system, you should see the string Hello, world! print to the terminal. If you don’t see this output, see the “Troubleshooting” section earlier for ways to get help.

If you did see Hello, world! printed, then congratulations! You’ve officially written a Rust program. That makes you a Rust programmer! Welcome!

Now, let’s go over what just happened in your “Hello, world!” program in detail. Here’s the first piece of the puzzle:

fn main() {

}

These lines define a function in Rust. The main function is special: it is always the first code that is run for every executable Rust program. The first line declares a function named main that has no parameters and returns nothing. If there were parameters, their names would go inside the parentheses, ( and ).

Also note that the function body is wrapped in curly brackets, { and }. Rust requires these around all function bodies. It’s considered good style to place the opening curly bracket on the same line as the function declaration, with one space in between.

At the time of writing, an automatic formatter, rustfmt, is under development. If you’d like to stick to a standard style across Rust projects, rustfmt is a tool that will format your code in a particular style. The plan is to eventually include it with the standard Rust distribution, like rustc, so depending on when you read this book, you may have it already installed! Check the online documentation for more details.

Inside the main function, we have this code:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
#}

This line does all of the work in this little program: it prints text to the screen. There are a number of details to notice here. The first is that Rust style is to indent with four spaces, not a tab.

The second important detail is the println! call. This code is calling a Rust macro. If it were calling a function instead, it would be entered as println (without the !). We’ll discuss Rust macros in more detail in Appendix D, but for now you just need to know that when you see a ! that means that you’re calling a macro instead of a normal function.

Next comes"Hello, world!" which is a string. We pass this string as an argument to println! and the total effect is that the string is printed to the screen. Easy enough!

We end the line with a semicolon ;, which indicates that this expression is over, and the next one is ready to begin. Most lines of Rust code end with a ;.

You’ve just seen how to run a newly created program, so now let’s break that process down and examine each step.

Before running a Rust program, you have to compile it using the Rust compiler by entering the rustc command and passing it the name of your source file, like this:

$ rustc main.rs

If you come from a C or C++ background, you’ll notice that this is similar to gcc or clang. After compiling successfully, Rust outputs a binary executable.

On Linux, Mac, and PowerShell on Windows, you can see the executable by entering the ls command in your shell as follows:

$ ls
main  main.rs

With CMD on Windows, you’d enter:

> dir /B %= the /B option says to only show the file names =%
main.exe
main.pdb
main.rs

This shows we have two files: the source code, with the .rs extension, and the executable (main.exe on Windows, main everywhere else). All that’s left to do from here is run the main or main.exe file, like this:

$ ./main  # or .\main.exe on Windows

If main.rs were your “Hello, world!” program, this would print Hello, world! to your terminal.

If you come from a dynamic language like Ruby, Python, or JavaScript, you may not be used to compiling and running a program being separate steps. Rust is an ahead-of-time compiled language, which means that you can compile a program, give the executable to someone else, and they can run it even without having Rust installed. If you give someone a .rb, .py, or .js file, on the other hand, they need to have a Ruby, Python, or JavaScript implementation installed (respectively), but you only need one command to both compile and run your program. Everything is a tradeoff in language design.

Just compiling with rustc is fine for simple programs, but as your project grows, you’ll want to be able to manage all of the options and make it easy to share your code. Next, we’ll introduce you to a tool called Cargo, which will help you write real-world Rust programs.