This is a compiler for Rust, including standard libraries, tools and documentation.

The Rust compiler currently must be built from a tarball, unless you are on Windows, in which case using the installer is recommended.

Since the Rust compiler is written in Rust, it must be built by a precompiled "snapshot" version of itself (made in an earlier state of development). As such, source builds require a connection to the Internet, to fetch snapshots, and an OS that can execute the available snapshot binaries.

Snapshot binaries are currently built and tested on several platforms:

• Windows (7, Server 2008 R2), x86 only
• Linux (various distributions), x86 and x86-64
• OSX 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") or greater, x86 and x86-64

You may find that other platforms work, but these are our "tier 1" supported build environments that are most likely to work.

Note: Windows users should read the detailed getting started notes on the wiki. Even when using the binary installer the Windows build requires a MinGW installation, the precise details of which are not discussed here.

To build from source you will also need the following prerequisite packages:

• g++ 4.4 or clang++ 3.x
• python 2.6 or later (but not 3.x)
• perl 5.0 or later
• gnu make 3.81 or later
• curl

Assuming you're on a relatively modern *nix system and have met the prerequisites, something along these lines should work.

$ wget http://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-0.5.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf rust-0.5.tar.gz
$ cd rust-0.5
$ ./configure
$ make && make install

You may need to use sudo make install if you do not normally have permission to modify the destination directory. The install locations can be adjusted by passing a --prefix argument to configure. Various other options are also supported, pass --help for more information on them.

When complete, make install will place several programs into /usr/local/bin: rustc, the Rust compiler; rustdoc, the API-documentation tool, and cargo, the Rust package manager.

Rust is primarily distributed under the terms of the MIT license, with portions covered by various BSD-like licenses.

See LICENSE.txt for details.

The tutorial is a good starting point.