My First Piece Of Rust

This project is the first piece of rust I've written.

Rust Install

Rust was installed on my Windows machine using the Rustup installer downloaded from this link.

After installation finished, I checked if Rust was up-to-date using the shell command rustup update.

VSCode Setup

Rust officially supports a single VSCode extension - Rust-analyzer, which features:

code completion with imports insertion
go to definition, implementation, type definition
find all references, workspace symbol search, symbol renaming
types and documentation on hover
inlay hints for types and parameter names
semantic syntax highlighting
and more

The Rust-analyzer VSCode extension can be found using this link.

hello-rust Project setup

The 'hello-rust' project was setup by running the following shell command:

cargo new hello-rust

This command creates a new rust hello-world project in a directory called hello-world. The program code should look something like this:

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

Moving into the new directory, the Rust program can be run by executing the following command:

cargo run

The output will be something similar to the following:

$ cargo run
   Compiling hello-rust v0.1.0 (/Users/ag_dubs/rust/hello-rust)
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1.34s
     Running `target/debug/hello-rust`
Hello, world!

Adding Dependencies

Dependencies are included to a project by appending to the dependencies list in the Cargo.toml file.

For example the ferris-says dependency was added by appending the following to the Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
ferris-says = "0.2"

Improving the hello-rust project

The hello-rust project was improved by adding the ferris-says dependency and using it to print a more interesting message:

use ferris_says::say;
use std::io::{stdout, BufWriter};

fn main() {
  let stdout = stdout();
  let message = String::from("Hello fellow Rustaceans!");
  let width = message.chars().count();

  let mut writer = BufWriter::new(stdout.lock());
  say(message.as_bytes(), width, &mut writer).unwrap();
}

This code should output the following:

 __________________________
< Hello fellow Rustaceans! >
 --------------------------
        \
         \
            _~^~^~_
        \) /  o o  \ (/
          '_   -   _'
          / '-----' \

Sources

This project was created following the official Rust "Getting Started" documentation, which can be found here.

Documentation for Cargo - the Rust package manager can be found here.