rust

Rust Programming Language

Entry point for Rust development. Provides an overview and routes to focused skills.

When to Use This Skill

Activate when:

• Starting a new Rust project
• Needing a general overview of Rust capabilities
• Unsure which specific Rust skill to load

Available Skills

This plugin provides focused skills for specific Rust topics:

• rust:ownership - Ownership rules, borrowing, slices, lifetimes
• rust:error-handling - Result, Option, ? operator, custom error types
• rust:anti-patterns - Anti-patterns and clippy anti-idioms to hunt and fix
• rust:async - Async functions, tokio, streams, threads, channels, shared state
• rust:testing - Unit tests, integration tests, cargo test, Cargo.toml, commands
• rust:troubleshooting - Best practices, common patterns, idiomatic Rust
• rust:cli - Argument parsing with clap, CLI output and progress, exit codes, testing CLI binaries

For core language features (traits, generics, collections, pattern matching), see references/language.md.

Quick Start

# Install via mise
mise use rust@latest

# Create a new project
cargo new myproject
cd myproject

# Build and run
cargo run

See templates/mise.toml for project task definitions.

Key Principles

• Ownership ensures memory safety: no garbage collector needed
• Borrow checker prevents data races: compile-time safety
• Zero-cost abstractions: high-level code compiles to efficient machine code
• Explicit over implicit: be clear about ownership, mutability, errors
• Prefer immutability: use mut only when needed
• Use the type system: let the compiler catch errors
• Test thoroughly: tests are first-class in Rust
• Use clippy: catch common mistakes and non-idiomatic code

Anti-fabrication

This skill follows core:anti-fabrication. Every claim about Rust language behavior, the standard library, and tooling commands is verified against the official documentation cited in sources.md — not inferred from generic familiarity with the language. Before asserting a language feature, API signature, or command behavior this skill and its references do not cover, check the installed Rust toolchain's documentation (rustup doc) or crates.io rather than guessing.