Rust Development - Day 1

A practical foundation for writing Rust apps well from the first commit. Not a textbook. Focuses on the differences from other languages, the day-1 decisions that shape everything else, and the small set of crates that cover most real apps.

When to Use

• Starting a new Rust project (CLI, service, library)
• Coming to Rust from Python, JavaScript, Go, Java/C#, or C++
• Choosing between owned/borrowed types, smart pointers, trait objects vs generics
• Picking error handling strategy (anyhow vs thiserror)
• Deciding which crates to reach for
• Configuring a minimal but opinionated Cargo.toml, clippy, and rustfmt

Day-1 Setup

# 1. Install the toolchain (rustup is the toolchain manager)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh