Welcome to your first Rust programming lesson! Rust is a modern systems programming language that emphasizes memory safety, zero-cost abstractions, and fearless concurrency. Unlike traditional systems languages, Rust prevents common programming errors like null pointer dereferences and buffer overflows at compile time, making it both safe and fast.
Before we can write Rust code, we need to install the Rust toolchain. The recommended way is using rustup, which is the official Rust installer and version management tool. Simply run the curl command shown to download and install Rust. This will install rustc the compiler, cargo the package manager, and other essential tools.
Now let's write our first Rust program. Every Rust program starts with a main function. We use println! macro to print text to the console. Notice the exclamation mark - this indicates it's a macro, not a regular function. To run the program, we compile it with rustc and then execute the binary. This produces our Hello World output.
Rust achieves memory safety through its unique ownership system. Each piece of memory has exactly one owner, and when the owner goes out of scope, the memory is automatically freed. This prevents common bugs like buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, and memory leaks. The compiler checks these rules at compile time, so there's no runtime overhead.