Most languages these days focus a lot of time on ensuring a complete toolchain, not just a compiler. We see build tools, formatting, documentation, and package management front and center not add-ons. Rust is no different although the tools are all extensible and can be customized for your process. The standard delivery mechanism is the crate, and the there is a shared repository of these at crates.io.

Just things that make me feel good about the code I write, they generally make things more approachable. Some aren’t even the language itself per-se, or even the toolchain, but the “Rust way”. For example the great documentation tools that build the standard library, docs.rustlang.org, as well as all 3rd party crates on docs.rs. The integration between the documentation and testing tools so that all the examples embedded in documentation are treated as tests, à la Python doctest. I also really appreciate the fact that I don’t have to argue about code style, or set coding conventions for every team or project I work on, there’s one coding style, and there’s a tool that enforces it, and any good build system rejects code that doesn’t pass rustfmt.

Rustup

Technically optional, practically indispensable, rustup manages components of the core toolchain. You can add and remove toolchains (the set of everything needed to compile for a platform) using the toolchain command. You can also add individual components to the toolchain using the component command. The most useful command though is update, this ensures the versions of all components in your installed toolchains are up to date.

Personally, I like to always have the stable and nightly toolchains to work with, and for ease of debugging the rust-src for the library and compiler. The rustfmt component should be a mandatory part of any build process, it formats all code to the same standards for all Rust programmers. Clippy on the other hand is the official, and at times obnoxious, lint tool; however it is also awesome, so run clippy regularly! Here’s the setup script I use.

#! /usr/bin/env zsh

curl  -sSf -o ./sh.rustup.rs https://sh.rustup.rs
sh ./sh.rustup.rs -y -v --no-modify-path

rustup toolchain add stable
rustup toolchain add nightly

rustup component add rust-src
rustup component add rustfmt
rustup component add clippy
rustup component add cargo

rustup update

Cargo

A pluggable command-line tool to manage Rust projects, cargo, is a number of things:

  • a build system with commands including bench, build, check, clean, doc, fetch, fix, run, & test;
  • a package manager with commands including install, new, search, & uninstall;
  • an interface to crates.io with commands including package, publish, & yank

It is also possible to install new commands for cargo, I tend to use:

  • Essential
    • cargo-edit; This tool extends Cargo to allow you to add, remove, and upgrade dependencies by modifying your Cargo.toml file from the command line.
    • cargo-make; Rust task runner and build tool.
    • cargo-update; Check for cargo installed executables’ newer versions and update as needed.
    • cargo-watch; Watch your repo for changes and build automatically.
  • Release Cycle
  • Debugging
    • cargo-profiler; A cargo subcommand to profile your applications.
    • [cargo-]flamegraph; A Rust-powered flamegraph generator with additional support for Cargo projects! It can be used to profile anything, not just Rust projects!
    • cargo-valgrind; Runs a binary, example, bench, … inside valgrind to check for memory leaks. Helpful in FFI contexts.
  • Useful
    • cargo-cache; Display information on the cargo cache (~~/.cargo/ or $CARGO_HOME). Optional cache pruning.
    • cargo-deps; Cargo subcommand for building dependency graphs of Rust projects.

For typical builds I use cargo make; I have a Git pre-push hook that runs cargo fmt, cargo clippy, cargo clean, and cargo build to ensure clean pushes, especially when using CI.

IntelliJ IDEA

Yes, I know it’s not actually part of the toolchain, but it is really well integrated. While the support for cargo as a build tool is great, there are two preferences you need to set for each project.

Open the preferences dialog, (⌘-,) on a mac.

  • Languages & Frameworks
    • Rust
      • Cargo
        • Check “Watch Cargo.toml”
        • Check “Compile all project targets if possible”
        • Select “Clippy” as the “External linter”
        • Check “Run external linter to analyze code on the fly”
      • Rustfmt
        • Check “Run rustfmt on Save”
rust cargo idioms