First steps in rust

I started to play around with rust and one of the first things we do when we learn a new language is write a little hello, world project. So I typed this in:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

I compiled via rustc main.rs and viola, my terminal shows hello world. A quick check on runtime shows it runs more or less instantaneously:

$ time ./main
Hello, world!

real 0m0.001s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

You may be wondering why I bothered to see how fast this was and if I told you that I've spent most of my time on the JVM over the past ten years then you'd know why I'm so paranoid.

But I digress. I looked at the binary size and saw it was 2.5M. Hmmm. My gut says that's a bit big so I wrote this little C++ program to compare:

#include <iostream>
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Sure enough the a.out was 17K. Rust must have some option to minimize for size and the docs say it's -C prefer_dynamic. When I compile the rust code, it generates a 17k binary, just like C++. yay.

But now it won't run since it's dynamically linked:

./main: error while loading shared libraries: libstd-205127404fcba336.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Crapola where is this library. What else may be missing?

$ ldd main
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffcc23cc000)
libstd-205127404fcba336.so => not found
libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f6a9e912000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f6a9eb14000)

Oh, just that one. Linux's locate didn't find it. I thought I saw a ~/.cargo directory somewhere.

find ~/.cargo/ -name "libstd*"

Nope. How about:

find ~/.rustup -name "libstd*"
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/libstd
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/wasm32-unknown-unknown/lib/libstd-077104c061bb2ffc.rlib
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/libstd-205127404fcba336.so
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/libstd-205127404fcba336.rlib
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/analysis/libstd-205127404fcba336.json
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/libstd-205127404fcba336.so
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/share/doc/rust/html/unstable-book/library-features/libstd-sys-internals.html
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/share/doc/rust/html/unstable-book/library-features/libstd-thread-internals.html
./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/share/doc/rust/html/unstable-book/library-features/libstd-io-internals.html

There you are you wascolly rabbit! But I don't know enough about rust to say if this is recommended approach:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib/rustlib/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib ./main
Hello, world!

But who cares that worked!