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Day 1: Introduction to Rust and Its Features for Beginners

Objective

By the end of this lesson, you will understand what Rust is, its key features, and how it compares to Python, particularly for those with experience in Python programming.

1. What is Rust?

Rust is a systems programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. It is known for its focus on memory safety and zero-cost abstractions, making it a popular choice for system-level programming, game development, and more.

2. Key Features of Rust

• Memory Safety: Rust eliminates common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows through its ownership model. This is different from Python, which handles memory management automatically.

• Ownership and Borrowing: Rust introduces a unique concept of ownership with rules that the compiler checks at compile time, ensuring safe memory access without needing a garbage collector.

• Concurrency: Rust’s concurrency model allows for safe and efficient multi-threading. It enables developers to write concurrent code without the fear of data races, which is a common challenge in languages like Python.

• Performance: Rust offers performance comparable to C and C++ due to its low-level control over system resources, while still being more user-friendly than those languages.

• Rich Type System: Rust's strong, static type system helps catch errors at compile time, reducing runtime issues.

• Cross-Platform: Rust programs can be compiled to run on various platforms without modification, much like Python.

3. Rust vs. Python

4. Key Terminology

• Crate: A package of Rust code. Rust uses a package manager called Cargo to manage crates.
• Cargo: Rust's package manager and build system. It helps in creating, building, and managing Rust projects.
• Compiler: The tool that converts Rust code into machine code. Rust uses LLVM for this purpose.

5. Installing Rust

To get started with Rust, you need to install it on your machine. Here are the steps:

1. Install Rust:

   • Open your terminal and run the following command to install Rust using rustup:

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

2. Follow the prompts to complete the installation.

3. Verify the installation: Run the following command:

   rustc --version
   

   You should see the version of Rust installed on your system.

6. Writing Your First Rust Program

Let’s write a simple Rust program to print "Hello, World!" to the console.

1. Create a new directory for your project:

   mkdir hello_rust
   cd hello_rust
   

2. Create a new Rust file:

   touch main.rs
   

3. Open main.rs in your favorite text editor and add the following code:

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

4. Compile and run your program:

   rustc main.rs
   ./main
   

You should see the output:

Hello, World!

7. Conclusion

Today, you learned about Rust, its key features, and how it compares to Python. You also installed Rust and wrote your first program.

Next Steps

Tomorrow, we’ll dive deeper into installing Rust and setting up the development environment with Cargo.