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2: Fundamentals

Rust has a steep learning curve at the start.

It is important to focus on the fundamentals.

Rust is loved because of the following:

  1. Safety.
  2. Concurrency.
  3. Speed.

Rust was created in 2006 as a passion project of a Mozilla employee.

Cargo

Cargo is a package manager for Rust, as well as the build system, docs generator and scripts runner.

main.rs is the file required to run our main application.

Some commands to note:

CmdDoes
cargo runRuns the application with debug symbols.
cargo run --releaseRuns the application without debug symbols. Takes longer to compile.
rustc --explain E0384Explains the compile error message.

Variables

fn main() { // Base initialization let bunnies = 2; // Initialising multiple variables at once let (bunny_count, carrots) = (2, 3); }

Rust intentionally mimics other languages: C and Python in particular.

You can have immutable variables, mutable variables and constants (more immutable-r).

fn main() { // Must be determined at compile time const WARP_FACTOR: f64 = 9.9; }

You can use a constant as a global and since they are inlined at compile time, they are really fast.

Scope

fn main() { let x = 5; { let y = 10; println!("{}, {}", x, y); } println!("{}, {}", x, y); // error: use of moved value: `y` }

You can also shadow a variable in the same scope:

fn main() { let mut x = 5; // x is mutable let x = x; // x is now immutable }

Memory safety

Rust guarantees safety at compile time.

fn main() { let enigma: i32; println!("{}", enigma); // error: use of possibly uninitialized variable: `enigma` }

If the compiler can guarantee something, then it won't allow it.

Functions

Functions should be snake case and denoted as fn. You also don't need to declare functions before usage within a file.

fn do_stuff(qty: f64, oz: f64) -> f64 { qty * oz } // Same as fn do_stuff(qty: f64, oz: f64) -> f64 { return qty * oz; }

If you leave the semicolon off of the last expression then it returns that value (also known as "tail expression").

Macros are a more advanced topic but known that functions that end in ! are called macros.

Module system

This is a powerful and flexible features.

. ├── Cargo.lock ├── Cargo.toml ├── src ├── lib.rs # The hello library ├── main.rs # The hello binary

For us to use a basic module.

// lib.rs pub fn greet() { println!("Hello, world!"); } // main.rs fn main() { hello::greet(); }

This current uses the absolute path of hello::greet() to call the function, but using absolute path can become an issue.

We can use the use statement to address this.

// lib.rs pub fn greet() { println!("Hello, world!"); } // main.rs use hello::greet; fn main() { greet(); }

Examples for using something from the standard library.

use std::collections::HashMap;

Repository

https://github.com/okeeffed/developer-notes-nextjs/content/rust/Ultimate-Rust-Crash-Course/2-Fundamentals

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