Setting up your environment

Since the programming language comes with a variety of toolchains, tools, linkers, and compiler versions, choosing the best-fitting variation is not easy. Additionally, Rust works on all major operating systems—which adds another variable.

However, installing Rust has become a trivial task when using rustup (https://rustup.rs/). On the website, a helpful script (or installer on Windows) that takes care of retrieving and installing the required components can be downloaded. The same tool lets you switch between and update (and uninstall) these components as well. This is the recommended way.

Choosing to use the Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler (MSVC) together with Rust requires that you install additional software such as the Visual C++ runtime and compiler tools.

To write code, an editor is also required. Since Visual Studio Code sports some Rust parts, it is a great choice together with the Rust extension. It's an open source editor developed by Microsoft and is well received across the world and the Rust community. In this recipe, we will install the following components:

• Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/)
• rustup (https://rustup.rs)
• rustc (and the rest of the compiler toolchains)
• cargo
• RLS (short for Rust Language Server—this is for autocompletion)
• Rust language support for Visual Studio Code

Getting ready

On a computer running either macOS, Linux, or Windows, only a web browser and internet connection are required. Bear in mind that the Windows installation works a little bit different from the *nix systems (Linux and macOS), which use scripts.

How to do it...

Each of the parts requires us to navigate to their respective websites, download the installer, and follow their instructions:

1. Open the browser and navigate to https://rustup.rs and https://code.visualstudio.com/.
2. Choose the installers fit for your operating system.
3. After downloading, run the installers and follow their instructions, choosing the stable branches.
4. Once successfully installed, we'll go deeper into each installation.

Now, let's go behind the scenes to understand the installation better

Managing the Rust installation with rustup.rs

To test whether the installation of the Rust toolchain with rustup was successful, the rustc command is available to run in Terminal (or PowerShell on Windows):

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.33.0 (2aa4c46cf 2019-02-28)

Note that you will have a later version when you are running this. It doesn't matter if you stick to the 2018 edition for your code.

Rust requires a native linker to be available on your system. On Linux or Unix systems (such as macOS), Rust calls cc for linking, whereas on Windows, the linker of choice is Microsoft Visual Studio's linker, which depends on having Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools installed. While it's possible to use an open source toolchain on Windows as well, this exercise is left for more advanced users.

Even with the 2018 edition, some useful features are still only available on nightly. To install the nightly edition of rustc, perform these steps:

1. Run rustup install nightly (use nightly-msvc on Windows if you are not using the GNU toolchain) in a Terminal or PowerShell window.
2. After the command finishes, the default toolchain (used in cargo) can be switched using rustup default nightly.

Installing Visual Studio Code and extensions

In its vanilla version, Visual Studio Code comes with syntax highlighting for many languages. However, for autocompletion or/and checking syntax, an extension is required. The Rust project supplies this extension:

1. Open Visual Studio Code.
2. Use Ctrl + P (cmd + P on macOS) to open the command-line interface, then type ext install rust-lang.rust to install the extension. The process should look like this:

The extension uses RLS to do static code analysis and provide completion and syntax checking. The extension should install the RLS component automatically, but sometimes it will fail to do this. One solution is to add the following configuration to Visual Studio Code's settings.json file (use Ctrl + P/cmd + P to find it):

{
    "rust-client.channel":"stable"
}

Alternatively, rustup will also install RLS with the rustup component add rls command.

Troubleshooting

Occasionally, updating the tools will lead to errors that files are missing or cannot be overwritten. This can be for a wide range of reasons, but a full reset of the installations can help. On Linux or macOS systems, the following command takes care of deleting anything rustup installed:

$ rm -Rf ~/.rustup

Windows's PowerShell now supports many Linux-like commands:

PS> rm ~/.rustup

This leads to the same result. After deleting the current installation, install rustup from scratch—this should install the latest version.

Now, let's go behind the scenes to understand the code better.

How it works...

The shell script, rustup.sh, is a great way to install Rust and it is the primary way to install Rust and other components today. In fact, it is common to use the script also in CI systems to install the compiler and other tools.

rustup is an open source project maintained by the Rust project and can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup.rs.

We've successfully learned how to set up our environment. Now let's move on to the next recipe.