Workshop Repo: Rust Fundamentals

NOTE: This is Work-In-Progress! Please check for updates a day before the workshop.

This Github repository contains all the source code and examples for the first homework assessment

Install Rust

Rustup provides you with all the software to compile and run Rust applications, e.g.

1. Cargo - build tool and package manager
2. rustfmt - Auto-formatting tool for Rust code
3. clippy - Linting for common mistakes

and many more. Rustup also allows you to install different compile targets and multiple toolchains, as well as keeping your toolchains up to date.

After installing, you should have a set of new command line tools available.

Verify your Rust installation:

1. Open a Terminal/Shell/Command Line of your choice
2. Check out this repo
3. Navigate to this repository
4. Enter

$ cargo build

5. Open your browser at https://localhost:3000

Recommended Editor

During the workshop, we will use Visual Studio Code as editor. It's free, fast and very extensible. Making yourself familiar with VS Code is highly recommended.

However, working with VS Code is not required. If you have a preferred editor with Rust support you're more productive with, please feel free to use whatever you like. What we highyly recommend though, is checking if your editor has support for Rust analyzer.

Recommended VS Code Extensions

To work effeciently, please install a couple of extensions that help you developing Rust. Note: Please don't install the recommendend Rust extension. It's outdated and the community decided to move to other tools. You can search and install VS Code extensions through the menu on the side

We recommend the following extensions:

• rust-analyzer. This is the main extension for Rust development, with the best language support available. Note: This extension is also available for other IDEs and editors, check out their website

• crates. This extension helps installing dependencies from crates.io

• Better TOML. TOML is the format that the dependency manager Cargo uses to manage dependencies. This extension helps formatting and editing TOML files

• CodeLLDB. All Rust code is compiled against LLVM. This extension helps debugging LLVM code inside VS Code

• Error Lens. Inline errors

Teaching goals

• Rust fundamentals: loops, structs, conditionals, APIs
• Basic ownership and borrowing
• Traits: Generics, trait bounds
• Error handling

Tasks

Our goal is to build a CLI tool that takes filenames as arguments and counts words, lines, bytes, and characters. It will display the sum of all words, lines, bytes and characters to stdout.

Those are the four exercises.

Exercise 1 (ex1.rs): count

• Implement a count function that takes an Cursor and returns a FileInfo struct.
• Implement the FileInfo
• Count the number of lines
• Count all words (e.g. ignore whitespace)
• Count bytes and characters

Exercise 2: error handling and trait bounds

• Extend your software to be able to handle everything hat implements BufRead (Cursor, BufReader)
• There are some situations that require error handling. Make sure of proper error handling through error propagation.

Exercise 3 (ex2.rs): traits

• Implement the Sum trait to collect the totals over an iterator of FileInfo.
• Implement the Display trait to put out all parts, taking a width of 8 characters per part

Exercise 4: CLI app

• Make your app runable as CLI application (std::env). Parse the command line arguments, call your functions, and display the results.

Extensions

• Structure your app to allow for different displays, e.g. show only words, only characters, a mixture of all four pieces.
• Extend your app to show the filename as well
• Use a library like clap to make a good CLI interface
• Try to parallelize across threads (rayon) and see if there's any difference in execution