Environment setup

To do the practical work from this course, you will need access to a suitably configured Rust development environment. We support three different ways to get such an environment, but depending on your particular situation, they may not all be available/suitable for you:

  • If you have been granted access to it during registration, then you can use the Devana computing cluster as your development environment.
  • If you are using a Linux desktop environment1 and a CPU that is based on the common x86_64 CPU architecture (any modern CPU from Intel or AMD), then another way to get a pre-built development environment is to use Linux containers.
  • If none of the above applies (e.g. you do not have access to Devana and you use a modern Mac with an Arm CPU), or if you fancy it for any another reason, then you can also manually install the required packages on your computer.
1

There are non-native ways to run Linux containers from a Windows or macOS desktop: Docker Desktop, WSL2, etc. They all work by running the container inside of a hidden x86 Linux VM. We don’t recommend them because in our experience you may experience issues connecting to the code editor of the rust_code_server image, and surprising runtime performance characteristics on Arm-based Macs due to Rosetta emulation.