Summary
Understanding the Cargo ecosystem of toolchains is very important to be effective as a Rust programmer, and this chapter has provided the foundational knowledge that will be used in future chapters.
We learned that there are three release channels in Rust – stable, beta, and nightly. Stable is recommended for production use, nightly is for experimental features, and beta is an interim stage to verify that there isn't any regression in Rust language releases before they are marked stable. We also learned how to use rustup to configure the toolchain to use for the project.
We saw different ways to organize code in Rust projects. We also learned how to build executable binaries and shared libraries. We also looked at how to use Cargo to specify and manage dependencies.
We covered how to write unit tests and integration tests for a Rust package using Rust's built-in test framework, how to invoke automated tests using cargo, and how to control test execution. We learned how to document packages both through inline documentation comments and using standalone markdown files.
In the next chapter, we will take a quick tour of the Rust programming language, through a hands-on project.