The Rust Ecosystem

The Rust ecosystem consists of a number of tools, of which the main ones are:

• rustc: 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, usually hosted on https://crates.io, and it will pass them to rustc 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 cargo when new versions of Rust are 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.