Managing Cargo

Before we start structuring our program with Cargo, we should compile a basic Rust script and run it. In order to do this, make a file called hello_world.rs with a main function housing the println! function with a string. Once this is done, we can navigate to the file and run the rustc command:

rustc hello_world.rs 

This command compiles the file into a binary to be run. If we compile it on Windows, we can run the binary with the following command:

.\hello_world.exe

If we compile it on Linux or macOS, we can run it with the following command:

./hello_world

The console should then print out the string. While this can come in useful when building a standalone script, it is not recommended for managing programs spanning multiple files. It is not even recommended when relying on dependencies. This is where Cargo comes in. Cargo manages everything – the running, testing, documentation, building, and dependency – out of the box with a few simple...