Introduction to Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that was designed to be fast, safe, multi-threaded and concurrent. In addition, it has a unique ownership and borrowing system that allows for efficient memory management without needing a garbage collector, which can reduce latencies and improve performance.

I've been using Rust for a while now (2018), and I find it to be a great language applications that require high performance and low latency. It works well with other languages too, such as Python via PyO3, which means you can write performance-critical parts of your application in Rust and expose them to Python for quick research/prototyping.

Quick setup

• Install rust
• Check version

  rustc --version

• To show active/installed toolchains

  rustup show

• To update rust nightly toolchain run

  rustup update nightly

• To update rust stable toolchain run

  rustup update stable

• To change the default toolchain to nightly

  rustup default nightly

• To install specific nightly toolchains

  rustup toolchain install nightly-2023-01-07

• Update dependencies in a package

  cargo update

Useful dev packages

To install globally via

cargo install <package>

• cargo-edit to add cargo-add, cargo-rm, cargo-upgrade commands
• cargo-watch to watch for changes and reload during development
• cargo-expand for macro expansion.
• cargo-show-asm - cargo subcommand showing the assembly, LLVM-IR and MIR generated for Rust code

References

Here are a few references for Rust programming:

• Rust lang - entry point to rust language
• Rust book - how rust works and its paradigms
• Rust source code - hosted on github
• Rust reference - for the syntax
• Rust std - standard library documentation
• Rust design patterns - design patterns, anti-patterns and idioms
• Awesome Rust - a curated list of Rust code and resources
• Scientific computing - collections of crates for scientific computing
• Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos