Let’s Rust

At the time of writing Rust has been voted the “most loved programming language” every year since 2016. On its website it is described as a programming language that is meant to empower everyone. It promises to be fast, memory efficient, reliable, safe and developer-friendly with useful error messages. It can be used to build web servers, command line tools, operating systems and also runs on embedded devices. It sounds as if Rust could be a really enjoyable alternative to C++. This is why I’d like to try it out.

I don’t have much experience in C++ or any other language that is similar in terms of performance. Thus, I might make a lot of mistakes along the way when I try to learn Rust. But as Einstein said: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

As a first step to learn the basics of Rust I will try to work through “the book”.

The common way to install the rust compiler is through the rustup command line tool. On Arch Linux rustup can be installed from the official repository via pacman

> sudo pacman -S rustup

There is also the ’official’ way of running a curl command to install rustup. The advantage of installing it from the Arch repository is that it is updated automatically when I update my system with pacman.

> rustup toolchain install stable