"Hello, World!" in Rust

Yesterday, I started to teach myself how to program in Rust. As always, the first step was a "Hello, World!" program.

Despite writing code for over a decade by now, my first step when coding in a new language or environment is still to recreate the canonical test program that outputs the string "Hello, World!". The point of this program is not demonstrate mastery (or even understanding) of a programming language. Instead, it is used to confirm that the program can be run at all.

Before diving in to even a slightly complicated test program as I learn to program in Rust, I wanted to make sure that I have a working environment. When writing more complicated programs, a compilation or runtime failure will generally signal that something is wrong in the code. On the other hand, with a simple "Hello, World!" program, a failure generally indicates that something is wrong with the development environment. Accordingly, I created the hello.rs file as follows:

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

I then compiled the program with the command rustc hello.rs, and executed it with ./hello. The result: printing out the string "Hello, World!". Success!

Now that I know that my environment is capable of compiling and running Rust programs without issue, I can be relatively confident moving forward that if there are issues, they come from my code being broken.

I guess I need to start writing more significant programs now.