vignesh-tw/rust_workshop

Workshop Agenda

Content	Duration
1. Workshop Context/Expectations	2 mins
2. What is Rust?	5 mins
3. [Why Rust?](#Why Rust?)	10 mins
4. [Learning resources](#Resources for Learning Rust)	5 mins
5. [Installation](#Install Rust )	-
6. [Rust Basics](#Rust Basics)	10 mins
7. [Differentiating features of Rust](#Differentiating features of Rust)	20 mins
8. Rust Exercise Context	5 mins
9. Iteration #1	20 mins
10. Iteration #2	20 mins
11. Iteration #3	20 mins
12. Iteration #4	20 mins

Getting Started with Rust 🦀❤️

What is Rust?

Rust is a modern and efficient programming language for developing systems applications. Performance, Reliability and Productivity are three pillars basis which Rust was created which are the reasons why rust was created.

Why Rust?

P1. Performance

Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages.

P2. Reliability

Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — enabling you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.

How safety and reliability is achieved,

1. A channel transfers ownership of the messages sent along it, so you can send a pointer from one thread to another without fear of the threads later racing for access through that pointer. Rust's channels enforce thread isolation.

2. A lock knows what data it protects, and Rust guarantees that the data can only be accessed when the lock is held. State is never accidentally shared. "Lock data, not code" is enforced in Rust.

3. Every data type knows whether it can safely be sent between or accessed by multiple threads, and Rust enforces this safe usage; there are no data races, even for lock-free data structures. Thread safety isn't just documentation; it's law.

4. You can even share stack frames between threads, and Rust will statically ensure that the frames remain active while other threads are using them. Even the most daring forms of sharing are guaranteed safe in Rust.

P3. Productivity

Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more.

Resources for Learning Rust

For a first-time Rust learner, there are several other resources:

• The Book - The most comprehensive resource for learning Rust, but a bit theoretical sometimes. You will be using this along with Rustlings!
• Rustlings - Small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code. Includes practice reading and responding to compiler messages!
• Rust By Example - Learn Rust by solving little exercises! It's almost like rustlings, but online
• Compilation of Rust Learning Materials - Exhaustive list all the standard learning materials shared by Rustlang as well as detailed list of other important blogs, videos, articles and repository for learning Rust

Install Rust

You will need to have Rust installed. You can get it by visiting https://rustup.rs. This'll also install Cargo, Rust's package/project manager.

MacOS/Linux

Just run:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

• Update using $ rustup update this works for both unix and windows based machines

Windows

Download the installer from this link

Note: Windows installer will download around 250MB for rust and 1.5GB for visual studio with C++ toolchain which is a dependency to run rust applications

If your distribution/OS is different than above you can also install Rust with steps as mentioned in this site

Rust Basics

Run the application like this from the 'rust_exercise' folder

cargo run

Creating a Project with Cargo

Let’s create a new project using Cargo and look at how it differs from our original “Hello, world!” project. Navigate back to your projects directory (or wherever you decided to store your code). Then, on any operating system, run the following:

$ cargo new hello_cargo
$ cd hello_cargo

A view into rust project structure

/hello_cargo
| - src/
| - - main.rs
| - cargo.toml

Other important stuff

• the main function is the entry point into the program fn main() {
• println! is a macro that prints a string to the screen

 println!("Guess the number!");
 
 println!("x = {x} and y + 2 = {}", y + 2); //given x=5 and y=10

• creating variables [Primitive Datatypes]

let apples = 5; // immutable
let mut bananas = 5; // mutable

let guess: u32 = "42".parse().expect("Not a number!");

let z: char = 'ℤ'; // with explicit type annotation
let heart_eyed_cat = '😻';

• creating variable [Complex Datatypes]

let a: [i32; 5] = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

let mut vec = Vec::new();

struct User {
    active: bool,
    username: String,
    email: String,
    sign_in_count: u64,
}

fn main() {
    let user1 = User {
        active: true,
        username: String::from("someusername123"),
        email: String::from("[email protected]"),
        sign_in_count: 1,
    };
}

Differentiating features of Rust

There are three main concepts with Rust:

1. Ownership (only one variable "owns" the data at one time, and the owner is in charge of deallocating)
2. Borrowing (you can borrow a reference to an owned variable)
3. Lifetimes (all data keeps track of when it will be destroyed)

Detailed explanation of above concepts in this link