Mastering Rust: A Step-by-Step Guide to Installing and Running Rust on Windows

Rust is a modern programming language that focuses on performance, reliability, and productivity. Rust is designed to help developers write fast and safe code, avoiding common errors such as memory leaks, data races, and buffer overflows. Rust is also expressive and flexible, allowing you to create applications for various domains, such as web development, embedded systems, machine learning, and game development.

If you are interested in learning Rust, the first step is to install it on your computer. In this blog post, I will show you how to install Rust on Windows 10 using rustup, a tool that manages Rust versions and tools. I will also show you how to create and run a simple Rust program using Visual Studio Code, a popular code editor.

Installing rustup

rustup is the recommended way to install Rust on Windows 10. rustup allows you to easily switch between different versions of Rust, such as stable, beta, and nightly. rustup also installs other tools that are useful for Rust development, such as cargo, the package manager and build system for Rust.

To install rustup, follow these steps:

1. Go to the official Rust download page and look for the "Download rustup-init.exe" button. There should be two of them, one for 32-bit and the other for 64-bit systems. Download the one for your system.
2. Run the rustup-init.exe installer. The command prompt window should open.
3. Press 1 to proceed with the default installation option, which will install the latest stable version of Rust and add it to your PATH environment variable.
4. Wait for the installation to complete. You should see a message saying "Rust is installed now. Great!".

Installing Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free and open source code editor that supports many programming languages, including Rust. VS Code has many features that make coding easier and more enjoyable, such as syntax highlighting, code completion, debugging, testing, and extensions.

To install VS Code, follow these steps:

1. Go to the official VS Code download page and click on the "Download for Windows" button.
2. Run the VSCodeUserSetup.exe installer and follow the instructions.
3. Launch VS Code from the Start menu or the desktop shortcut.

Installing the Rust extension for VS Code

To enhance your Rust development experience in VS Code, you can install the Rust extension, which provides features such as code formatting, error checking, code navigation, documentation lookup, and more.

To install the Rust extension, follow these steps:

1. In VS Code, click on the Extensions icon on the left sidebar or press Ctrl+Shift+X.
2. In the search box, type "rust" and press Enter.
3. Find the extension named "Rust" by rust-lang and click on the "Install" button.
4. Wait for the installation to finish. You may need to reload VS Code for the extension to take effect.

Creating and running a simple Rust program

Now that you have installed Rust and VS Code, you are ready to create and run your first Rust program. To do so, follow these steps:

1. In VS Code, click on the File menu and select "New Folder". Give your folder a name, such as "hello-rust".
2. In the folder, create a new file named "main.rs". This will be your main source file for your Rust program.
3. In the main.rs file, type or copy-paste the following code:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

This code defines a function named main, which is the entry point of every Rust program. The function prints "Hello, world!" to the standard output using the println! macro.

4. To run your program, open a terminal in VS Code by clicking on the Terminal menu and selecting "New Terminal". Alternatively, you can press Ctrl+Shift+`.
5. In the terminal, type or copy-paste the following command:

cargo run

This command uses cargo to compile and run your program. Cargo is a tool that manages dependencies, builds, tests, and runs Rust projects.

Wait for cargo to finish its work. You should see something like this in the terminal:

Compiling hello-rust v0.1.0 (C:\\Users\\...\\hello-rust)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.76s
Running `target\\debug\\hello-rust.exe`
Hello, world!

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Rust on Windows 10 and created and run your first Rust program using VS Code.