Welcome to Comprehensive Rust 🦀

This is a free Rust course developed by the Android team at Google. The course covers the full spectrum of Rust, from basic syntax to advanced topics like generics and error handling.

The latest version of the course can be found at https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/. If you are reading somewhere else, please check there for updates.

The goal of the course is to teach you Rust. We assume you don’t know anything about Rust and hope to:

• Give you a comprehensive understanding of the Rust syntax and language.
• Enable you to modify existing programs and write new programs in Rust.
• Show you common Rust idioms.

We call the first four course days Rust Fundamentals.

Building on this, you’re invited to dive into one or more specialized topics:

• Android: a half-day course on using Rust for Android platform development (AOSP). This includes interoperability with C, C++, and Java.
• Chromium: a half-day course on using Rust within Chromium based browsers. This includes interoperability with C++ and how to include third-party crates in Chromium.
• Bare-metal: a whole-day class on using Rust for bare-metal (embedded) development. Both microcontrollers and application processors are covered.
• Concurrency: a whole-day class on concurrency in Rust. We cover both classical concurrency (preemptively scheduling using threads and mutexes) and async/await concurrency (cooperative multitasking using futures).

Non-Goals

Rust is a large language and we won’t be able to cover all of it in a few days. Some non-goals of this course are:

• Learning how to develop macros: please see Chapter 19.5 in the Rust Book and Rust by Example instead.

Assumptions

The course assumes that you already know how to program. Rust is a statically-typed language and we will sometimes make comparisons with C and C++ to better explain or contrast the Rust approach.

If you know how to program in a dynamically-typed language such as Python or JavaScript, then you will be able to follow along just fine too.