Rust for Windows (Subsystem for Linux)

This blog post explains how to install and use the Rust programming language under Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

• Take your first steps with Rust – Learn | Microsoft Docs
• Microsoft Previews ‘Rust for Windows’ – Slashdot
• Rust for Windows, and the *windows* crate | Microsoft Docs

You can get the Windows Rust installer (rustup-init.exe) and instructions to install Rust on other operating systems including WSL here:

• https://rustup.rs/

This is the installation command that I used under WSL (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS):

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Whether you run the Windows installer or the curl command, choose Option 1 to Proceed with installation.

After installing Rust on WSL, I received this error opening new shell windows and could not use the rust command line tools:

-bash: /home/jw/.bashrc: line 131: syntax error: unexpected end of file

The installer had neglected to insert linefeeds before appending “source $HOME/.cargo/env” to ~/.bashrc, so I added the linefeed before this line in that file. After starting a new shell, I could use rustup, rustc, and cargo.

Using the canonical main.rs:

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

To compile an “ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=c875cbfbeac8280c8c04b5ff640114e1aa7a3cb8, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, with debug_info, not stripped” under WSL:

rustc main.rs

To run it:

./main

To create a new project:

cargo new <ProjectName>
cd <ProjectName>
cargo run

To use the Windows variants and generate an .exe file, you can add .exe to the same commands that generate a “PE32+ executable (console) x86-64, for MS Windows”.

rustc.exe main.rs
main.exe

To create, compile, and run a new project:

cargo.exe new <ProjectName>
cd <ProjectName>
cargo.exe run

It seems that you can only use the Windows commands on Windows file systems.