[#]: subject: "Rust Basics Series #1: Create and Run Your First Rust Program"
[#]: via: "https://itsfoss.com/rust-introduction/"
[#]: author: "Pratham Patel https://itsfoss.com/author/pratham/"
[#]: collector: "lkxed"
[#]: translator: " "
[#]: reviewer: " "
[#]: publisher: " "
[#]: url: " "

Rust Basics Series #1: Create and Run Your First Rust Program
======

![][1]

The Rust programming language is one of the fastest adopted systems programming languages by developers and tech companies. It is also voted as one of the **most loved programming languages** by developers who use it on a daily basis. Rust has [been getting this love for][2]**[seven consecutive years][2]** now!

It is so popular that there are now two big efforts being carried out in the Linux ecosystem:

- Inclusion of [Rust as a secondary programming language in the Linux kernel][3]
- System76 is [writing their own desktop environment from scratch using Rust][4]

And that is just in the Linux ecosystem. Android's Bluetooth implementation [Gabeldorsche][5] is now written in Rust.

Do you see the rising popularity of Rust? You would probably like to learn coding in Rust.

### Why should you consider Rust over other programming languages?

Rust is a programming language that has an **extremely strict type system**. As a result, you are "forced" to not write bad code in the first place (well, usually).

The Rust programming language has the following "goals":

- **Speed**: Rust's binaries are as fast as C binaries, sometimes outpacing C++ binaries!
- **Memory safety**: Rust has a huge emphasis on memory safety.
- **Concurrency**: Focusing on memory safety eliminates a lot of race condition-like scenarios and helps you introduce concurrency in your program.

Following are a few errors mistakes one might make in languages like C/C++ (but not with Rust):

- Use after free
- Double free
- Accessing out-of-bound values
- Using `NULL`
- Inappropriate pointer arithmetic and/or access
- Use of uninitialized variable(s)
- Thread-unsafe multi-threading

Have a look at the issues caused by such issues at major corporations like [Apple][6], [Microsoft][7], [Google][8], [0day][9] etc,

Now that you know why one might want to choose the Rust programming language over any other one, let's start with the Rust language tutorial series!

### Intended audience

For the love of Rust, I am writing this series of Rust tutorials to help you get acquainted with the concept of Rust programming.

This tutorial series is intended for folks already familiar with programming languages like C and C++. I assume you know basic terms like _variables_, _functions_, _loops_, etc.

The only prerequisites that I ask from you are your time and some effort.

### Installing the Rust compiler

I would prefer that you have the [Rust compiler installed locally][10]. You can do so by running the following command:

```
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.3 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
```

![Installing Rust on Ubuntu Linux][11]

Apart from the Rust Compiler, I also recommend installing a few more tools that will help you in the development process:

```
rustup component add rust-src rust-analyzer rust-analysis
```

💡

If you do not wish to install the Rust compiler, no worries. You can run the Rust code directly in your browser! Just head over to the 

[Rust Playgrounds website][12]

 and paste the code discussed here.

### Hello Rust!

Since Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan introduced the C programming language with the "Hello world" program, it has become a custom in the UNIX world to do so with any new programming language you learn.

So let's write our Hello World program in Rust as well.

I will [create a project directory][13] called `learn-rust-its-foss` in my home directory. In there, I create another directory called `hello-world`. Inside that, I will create a `main.rs` file:

```
// this code outputs the text
// "Hello world!" to `stdout`

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

📋

Just like C, C++ and Java source files have the extensions 

```
.c
```

, 

```
.cpp
```

 and 

```
.java
```

 respectively, the Rust source files have the 

```
.rs
```

 file extension.

As a C/C++ programmer, you might have used [gcc on Linux][14], `clang` on macOS and MSVC on Windows. But to compile Rust code, the language creators themselves provide an official `rustc` compiler.

Running a Rust program is the same as [executing C/C++ program][15]. You compile the code to get the executable file and then run this executable to run the code.

```
$ ls
main.rs

$ rustc main.rs

$ ls
main  main.rs

$ ./main
Hello world!
```

Nice!

### Deciphering Rust code

Now that you wrote, compiled and ran your first ever Rust program, let's de-structure the "Hello world" code and understand each part.

```
fn main() {
}
```

The `fn` keyword is used to declare a function in Rust. Following it, `main` is the name of this particular function that was declared. Like many compiled programming languages, the `main` is a special function used as your program's entry point.

Any code written inside the `main` function (between the curly brackets `{``}`) gets executed upon program start-up.

#### println macro

Inside the `main` function, there is one statement:

```
println!("Hello world!");
```

Like the C language's standard library has the `printf` function, Rust language's standard library has the `println`**macro**. A macro is similar to a function but it is distinguished by the **exclamation mark**. You'll learn about macros and functions later in this series.

The `println` macro takes in a format string and puts it to the program's output (in our case, that is terminal). Since I wish to output some text instead of a variable, I will enclose the text inside double quotes (`"`). Finally, I end this statement using a semi-colon to denote the end of the statement.

📋

Just know that anything that looks like a function call but has an exclamation mark (

```
!
```

) before the opening parentheses is a macro in the Rust programming language.

#### Comments

Rust follows the known commenting style of the C programming language. A single line comment starts with two forward slashes (`//`) and a multi-line comment is started by `/*` and ends with `*/`.

```
// this is a multi-line comment
// but nothing stops me to doing the same
// on the second or third line too!

/*
 * this is a "true" mutli-line comment
 * because it is _fancy_
 */
```

### Conclusion

You just took the first step towards coding in Rust with the Hello World program.

As a practice, perhaps you can write and execute a Rust program that prints "Yes! I did Rust".

In the next part of the series, you'll learn to use variables in your Rust program. Stay tuned!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

via: https://itsfoss.com/rust-introduction/

作者：[Pratham Patel][a]
选题：[lkxed][b]
译者：[译者ID](https://github.com/译者ID)
校对：[校对者ID](https://github.com/校对者ID)

本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译，[Linux中国](https://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出

[a]: https://itsfoss.com/author/pratham/
[b]: https://github.com/lkxed/
[1]: https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/03/linux-mega-packt.webp
[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/?ref=itsfoss.com#section-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages
[3]: https://news.itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-6-1-release/?ref=itsfoss.com
[4]: https://news.itsfoss.com/pop-os-cosmic-rust/?ref=itsfoss.com
[5]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//system/bt/+/83498aa554aea220fcff30b6310a0a7b4557969f/gd/rust/linux/stack/src/bluetooth.rs?ref=itsfoss.com
[6]: https://langui.sh/2019/07/23/apple-memory-safety/?ref=itsfoss.com
[7]: https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-systems-programming-language/?ref=itsfoss.com
[8]: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/queue-hardening-enhancements.html?ref=itsfoss.com
[9]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lkNJ0uQwbeC1ZTRrxdtuPLCIl7mlUreoKfSIgajnSyY/view?ref=itsfoss.com#gid=1190662839
[10]: https://itsfoss.com/install-rust-cargo-ubuntu-linux/
[11]: https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/03/install-rust.svg
[12]: https://play.rust-lang.org/?ref=itsfoss.com
[13]: https://itsfoss.com/make-directories/
[14]: https://learnubuntu.com/install-gcc/?ref=itsfoss.com
[15]: https://itsfoss.com/run-c-program-linux/