GNU/Linux Programmer's Solver - Rust

// Rust doesn't have
// multiline comments
// -\(oo)/-

fn main ()
{
    println! ("Hello World!"); // This is a comment
    println! ("{}", "This is a text strings
spread through multiple lines");
}

Rust is another relatively recent compiled language. Source files in Rust use the .rs extension.

Rust is quite similar to C/C++, in the way of terminating instructions and grouping them, using the ; as a separator and the {} for grouping instructions. It also requires the definition of a main function to indicate the start of the program and uses single-line comments like C++, not being able to write multi-line comments.

DID YOU KNOW…

Rust was the first language, in addition to C and assembly, to be supported for the development of the Linux kernel. Google also announced support for Rust within its Open Source Android project, as an alternative to C/C++. The infamous Microsoft is also considering the language to rewrite parts of the main Windows libraries.

The language handles multi-line strings without problems.

The macro println! (macros in Rust are identified with a ! character at the end of the name) prints adding a carriage return. As you can imagine, there is another macro called print! that doesn’t add the carriage return.

To compile and execute our program we will use the commands:

        $ rustc hello
        $ ./hello

The language presents itself as an improved alternative to C/C++, offering similar performance with more modern features such as type safety, avoiding the need to use a garbage collector, and concurrency.

I’M A NEWBIE…

println! is not a function but a macro that simplifies printing strings to standard output. This macro is converted into specific code during the compilation process. So, it’s a macro.

Rust was born as a personal project by Graydon Hoare while working for Mozilla in 2006. The name of the language seems to come from a family of fungi… The project was sponsored by Mozilla in 2009 and officially announced in 2010, but it wasn’t until 2012 that the first pre-alpha version was released, and version 1.0 didn’t arrive until 2015. That said, from version 1, new features are added in 6-week cycles.

Rust is one of the youngest languages we’ll be using.

Rust offers its own installation system. You can follow the official page for details; however, most distributions offer their own packages. For Debian distributions, you can install it with the following command: