Tooling

Tooling#

Rust’s toolchain is famously tightly integrated; most things ship in a single rustup install.

Toolchain Manager#

rustup, installs and updates the Rust toolchain(s).

$ rustup install stable
$ rustup update
$ rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
$ rustup component add rustfmt clippy rust-analyzer

Compiler#

rustc, the compiler. You’ll rarely call it directly; cargo drives it.

$ rustc --version

Cargo#

The verb every Rust developer types. Cargo bootstraps projects, fetches dependencies, builds, runs, tests, benchmarks, and produces documentation. cargo add, cargo build --release, cargo test, and cargo doc cover most of an everyday workflow.

The build tool, package manager, test runner, and project bootstrapper.

$ cargo new myproj
$ cargo build
$ cargo build --release
$ cargo run -- --flag value
$ cargo add anyhow tokio --features rt-multi-thread
$ cargo update
$ cargo doc --open

Formatter#

rustfmt, ships with the toolchain.

$ cargo fmt
$ cargo fmt --check

Linter#

clippy, the standard linter; ships with the toolchain.

$ cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

Testing#

The standard library’s #[test] and #[cfg(test)] form the core. cargo test discovers tests in src/ (unit) and tests/ (integration).

$ cargo test
$ cargo test --doc
$ cargo test -- --nocapture

Companions.

proptest / quickcheck, property-based testing.
criterion, statistically-sound benchmarks.
insta, snapshot testing.
cargo-nextest, faster test runner.

Debugging#

gdb / lldb, step debuggers.
rust-gdb / rust-lldb, pretty-printed wrappers.
cargo-flamegraph, profiling.
tokio-console, async runtime introspection.

Documentation#

rustdoc, ships with cargo; generates docs from /// doc comments.

$ cargo doc --no-deps --open

Triple-slash comments are interpreted as Markdown and tested by cargo test --doc.

Editor Support#

rust-analyzer, the official LSP. Auto-installs in most IDEs.

Useful Cargo Subcommands#

cargo-edit , cargo add, rm, upgrade.
cargo-watch , re-run on file changes.
cargo-expand , show macro-expanded source.
cargo-audit , scan dependencies for known CVEs.
cargo-deny , license / security policy enforcement.
cargo-outdated , check for newer versions.
cargo-tree , visualize the dependency graph.

Cross-Compilation#

$ rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
$ cargo build --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

For complex targets, cross runs the build inside a Docker container with the right toolchain.