A single command to compile and run Rust programs
TL;DR
Compile and run rust programs with one simple bash script, i.e.
rust program.rs.
I've been working my way through rust by example recently, and found myself creating and running a lot of small rust programs. They're all going in the same folder, as it's not worth creating a new cargo project for each program in the tutorial. One thing that I'm missing from interpreted languages is a simple run command, i.e. a command that will compile and run the program immediately.
I found this issue in the GitHub repository, where this very thing is discussed. Apparently there used to be a rust command, as opposed to the rustc command that we now use for compiling, which had run command to serve this purpose. The issue suggests that it might make a comeback in the future.
For now, I've created a simple bash script that compiles the input .rs file, runs the output and then deletes the output (this stops the directory being littered with executables). I've placed this in /usr/local/bin/rust, and it can be run with all the same arguments as rustc, with the caveat that it expects the input file to be the first argument. It's extremely simple and fundamentally flawed due to the aforementioned caveat, but I thought I'd share it anyway:
#!/bin/bash
name=$(basename $1 .rs)
rustc $@ && ./$name && rm $name