Rust — Memory-Safe Systems Language and Cargo Toolchain

Overview

Rust compiles to native code with no garbage collector; the borrow checker enforces memory and thread safety at compile time. Day-to-day work goes through a small set of tools: rustup installs and switches toolchains, cargo creates, builds, tests and publishes packages (crates), clippy lints, and rustfmt formats. Stable releases ship every six weeks; language-level breaking changes are opt-in through editions (2015, 2018, 2021, 2024), set per crate in Cargo.toml.

This skill covers the language and toolchain. For web servers use the axum or rocket skills, for async runtimes tokio, for desktop apps tauri, for WebAssembly wasm.

Instructions

Install the toolchain with rustup

# Install rustup, not a distro rustc package; Debian 13+/Ubuntu 24.04+, Arch and Homebrew ship it
sudo apt install rustup            # or: sudo pacman -S rustup / brew install rustup
rustup default stable

On Fedora the DNF package provides only rustup-init; run it once to create the proxies and install a toolchain. Homebrew's rustup does not put rustc/cargo on PATH; add $(brew --prefix rustup)/bin. Without a package manager, download the installer binary from the official domain and run it as a separate step (on Windows, run rustup-init.exe from https://rustup.rs):