Learn the Fundamentals of Rust
Start your journey with the language that blends performance, safety, and concurrency.
What is Rust?
Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, especially safe concurrency. It provides memory safety without a garbage collector, making it ideal for performance-critical applications.
Core Concepts
- Ownership: Each value in Rust has a single owner. When the owner goes out of scope, the value is dropped.
- Borrowing: References to data can be either mutable or immutable, but not both simultaneously.
- Lifetimes: The compiler ensures that references do not outlive the data they point to.
- Pattern Matching: Powerful match expressions allow clean handling of different data shapes.
- Concurrency: Rust's ownership system eliminates data races at compile time.
Getting Started
To start coding in Rust, install rustup, which sets up the compiler and Cargo, Rust’s package manager.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
Once installed, create a new project:
cargo new hello_rust
cd hello_rust
cargo run
This will compile and run the default “Hello, world!” program.
Further Resources
- The Rust Programming Language – The official book, free online.
- Rust Standard Library – Documentation for core library components.
- Rust by Example – Hands‑on examples covering key features.