Rust Ecosystem and Tools

Get familiar with the Rust ecosystem including Cargo, various tooling, and the community resources available to Rust developers.

By Kevin McAleer,    2 Minutes

Introduction

The Rust ecosystem is rich and evolving, with tools and resources designed to make Rust development efficient and enjoyable. This lesson introduces Cargo, Rust’s package manager and build system, along with other tools and community resources.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how to use Cargo and crates to manage Rust projects.
• Learn about the tools available for Rust development.
• Discover the community resources available for learning and troubleshooting.

Cargo and Crates

Cargo is Rust’s build system and package manager, similar to Python’s pip, but also manages building code, downloading libraries, and more. Crates are Rust’s term for a package of code, and Cargo makes it easy to manage dependencies by placing them in a Cargo.toml file.

[dependencies]
serde = "1.0"

This TOML file tells Cargo to download and include the serde crate (package) in your project.

Rust Tooling

Rust provides several tools to assist in development:

• rustc: The Rust compiler.
• rustfmt: A tool for formatting Rust code according to style guidelines.
• Clippy: A linter that provides recommendations for creating idiomatic Rust code.
• Rust Language Server (RLS) or rust-analyzer: Tools that support IDEs and code editors with features like code completion and inline error messages.

Community Resources

The Rust community is active and welcoming, providing a wealth of resources for developers:

• The Rust Programming Language book, often just called “The Book,” is an excellent starting point for learning Rust.
• Rust Users Forum is great for asking questions and sharing your Rust projects.
• Rust subreddit and Rust Twitter are good places to keep up with news and events.

Summary

This lesson provided an overview of the Rust ecosystem and tools, including Cargo and various Rust development tools, and highlighted community resources that support learning and problem-solving in Rust.