Meet your software

In this chapter we will learn how to build, run and debug some very simple programs. The goal here is not to get into the details of MB2 Rust programming (yet), but to just familiarize yourself with the mechanics of the process.

First, a quick note about the conventions used in the rest of this book. We expect you to get a copy of the whole book with

git clone http://github.com/rust-embedded/discovery-mb2

The book's "source code" is in discovery-mb2/mdbook/src. You should go there in your copy and look around a bit. Each chapter directory has both the source Markdown text and the complete source for all the programs in that chapter. When we refer to some path like src/main.rs, we mean that place starting from the chapter you are working in. For example, your discovery-mb2 has a file called mdbook/src/05-meet-your-software/examples/init.rs. We will refer to that file as just examples/init.rs in this chapter.

There are two basic kinds of Rust code: "binary" executable programs, and "library" code. The library code won't play a huge role in this book. Binary program source code can live in one of several places:

• A program in src/main.rs will be automatically compiled and run by cargo embed or cargo run. No special flags are needed.

• A program in examples/foo.rs can be compiled and run by cargo embed --example foo or cargo run --example foo.

• A program in src/bin/bar.rs can be compiled and run by cargo embed --bin bar or cargo run --bin bar.

This is confusing, but it's a standard convention of Cargo.

Now let's move on and work with all this.