rust - first steps

I’ve decided to learn Rust again. It’s one of those things that have been on my list for awhile. This time round, I really just wanna have fun - stop, smell the flowers. I’m no longer a developer, so I don’t have to worry about not being able to grok it (actually, I don’t know why I ever stressed about Rust before - not like we used it at work).

So, first steps.

Every time I pick up a new language, I like writing lots of small snippets. Code that isn’t particularly useful, or impressive. Like, how do I count words in a sentence? Splitting strings? Counting things in arrays? Things like that.

However, based off my extremely rusty memory (ha - nailed it), there isn’t a particularly good way to write small scripts in Rust. You could run code with rustc, but you don’t get any useful messages from the compiler. And I don’t want to keep creating new projects with cargo new for small code snippet - those large binaries are PITA.

But, I must’ve gotten better at googling, because I came across this thread: Is there any way to compile and run a single rust file for exercise? : r/rust

TLDR: have a single project, and create standalone files in src/bin (e.g. src/bin/example.rs. Then just run cargo run --bin example. Then, run cleanup with cargo clean. This way, I’ll still get code completion and helpful messages from rust-analyzer in VS Code.