The Rust Ecosystem

• : the Rust compiler which turns .rs files into binaries and other intermediate formats.

• cargo: the Rust dependency manager and build tool. Cargo knows how to download dependencies hosted on and it will pass them to when building your project. Cargo also comes with a built-in test runner which is used to execute unit tests.

• rustup: the Rust toolchain installer and updater. This tool is used to install and update rustc and when new versions of Rust is released. In addition, rustup can also download documentation for the standard library. You can have multiple versions of Rust installed at once and rustup will let you switch between them as needed.

• Rust has a rapid release schedule with a new release coming out every six weeks. New releases maintain backwards compatibility with old releases — plus they enable new functionality.

• There are three release channels: “stable”, “beta”, and “nightly”.

• • The editions are allowed to make backwards incompatible changes to the language.

  • To prevent breaking code, editions are opt-in: you select the edition for your crate via the file.

  • To avoid splitting the ecosystem, Rust compilers can mix code written for different editions.

  • Read more from the official Cargo Book