What it is
Rust is a programming language for software that needs to be fast and reliable: command-line tools, servers, system components. Its compiler checks how memory is used, so whole classes of bugs, such as using freed memory or data races between threads, are caught before the program runs.
It comes with Cargo, which creates projects, fetches libraries (called crates) from crates.io, builds, tests and documents your code.
Why it’s here
- Speed without crashes. Performance close to C, with memory safety checked at compile time.
- Cargo. One tool for dependencies, builds and tests.
- Builds Rust tools. Many modern command-line tools are written in Rust and install with
cargo install.
On CoreDesktop
CoreDesktop installs Arch’s rust package, which provides rustc and cargo and is kept current by update with the rest of the pacman packages. Cargo’s download cache in ~/.cargo/registry is left out of backups, and the AI agents in the AI sandbox can write to it and reach crates.io.
cargo new hello && cd hello && cargo run