002 Why Rust?

• Why Rust? It’s important to answer this question to motivate our learning
• Systems/low-level programming offers benefits like faster runtimes, but it’s incredibly hard to work with because of subtle bugs that come from things like memory-safety issues
• Rust avoids these bugs with a ‘smart’ compiler that refuses to compile code with elusive bugs
  • This allows devs to focus on program logic rather than chasing down bugs
• Rust also brings contemporary developer tools to the systems programming world:
  • Cargo: a dependency manager that makes adding, compiling, and managing dependencies seamless
  • Rustfmt: a linter that ensures consistent coding style
  • Rust language server: a language server that powers code completion/inline error messages on IDEs
• In a nutshell, Rust just makes low-level programming much more straightforward and approachable
  • This is why it has such a big fanbase
• Rust is an ahead-of-time compiled language, which means that you can make an executable (via something like rustc main.rs) and give it to someone else. They can then run it without having Rust itself installed
  • Other languages (like Python) don’t require compile-run cycles and instead have only 1 command, but require language support for someone to run programs
  • Trade-offs!
• Three main commands to know when working with Cargo, Rust’s built-in dependency manager
  • cargo build creates an executable file in the target/debug subdirectory
    • cargo build --release is what you should run when you’re building for release, not development
      • Benefit is that it adds optimizations to make your executable run faster, but these take more time to apply (so not optimal for quick testing)
      • Places executable in target/release instead of target/debug
  • cargo run handles building and running all in 1 command, so you don’t have to find and run the executable file
  • cargo check just checks that there aren’t any compilation errors — we can call this periodically as we’re coding to check ourselves

References

• Chapter 1 of The Rust Programming Language by Steve Nichols and Nicole Klabnick.