Training-day instructions

Expectations and conventions

Welcome to this practical about writing high performance computing in Rust!

This course assumes that the reader has basic familiarity with C (especially number types, arithmetic operations, string literals and stack vs heap). It will thus not explain concepts which are rigorously identical between Rust and C for the sake of concision. If this is not your case, feel free to ask the teacher about any surprising construct in the course’s material.

We will also compare Rust with C++ where they differ, so that readers familiar with C++ can get a good picture of Rust specificities. But previous knowledge of C++ should not be necessary to get a good understanding of Rust via this course.

Finally, we will make heavy use of “C/++” abbreviation as a shorter alternative to “C and C++” when discussing common properties of C and C++, and how they compare to Rust.

Exercises source code

At the time where you registered, you should have been directed to instructions for setting up your development environment. If you did not follow these instructions yet, now is the right time!

Now that the course has begun, we will download a up-to-date copy of the exercises’ source code and unpack it somewhere inside of your development environement. This will create a subdirectory called exercises/ in which we will be working during the rest of the course.

Please pick your environement below in order to get appropriate instructions:

Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {
      $ErrorActionPreference="Stop"
      if (Test-Path exercises) {
            throw "ERROR: Please move or delete the existing 'exercises' subdirectory"
      }
      Invoke-WebRequest https://numerical-rust-cpu-d1379d.pages.math.cnrs.fr/setup/exercises.zip  `
                        -OutFile exercises.zip
      Expand-Archive exercises.zip -DestinationPath .
      Remove-Item exercises.zip
      Set-Location exercises
}

cd ~
# Can't use rm -rf exercises because we must keep the bind mount alive
for f in $(ls -A exercises); do rm -rf exercises/$f; done  \
&& wget https://numerical-rust-cpu-d1379d.pages.math.cnrs.fr/setup/exercises.zip  \
&& unzip -u exercises.zip  \
&& rm exercises.zip  \
&& cd exercises

if [ -e exercises ]; then
    echo "ERROR: Please move or delete the existing 'exercises' subdirectory"
else
    wget https://numerical-rust-cpu-d1379d.pages.math.cnrs.fr/setup/exercises.zip  \
    && unzip exercises.zip  \
    && rm exercises.zip  \
    && cd exercises
fi

General advice

The exercises are based on code examples that are purposely incorrect. Therefore, any code example within the provided exercises Rust project, except for 00-hello.rs, will either fail to compile or fail to run to completion. A TODO code comment or … symbol will indicate where failures are expected, and your goal in the exercises will be to modify the code in such a way that the associated example will compile and run. For runtime failures, you should not need to change the failing assertion, instead you will need to change other code such that the assertion passes.

If you encounter any failure which does not seem expected, or if you otherwise get stuck, please call the trainer for guidance!

With that being said, let’s get started with actual Rust code. You can move to the next page, or any other page within the course for that matter, through the following means:

• Left and right keyboard arrow keys will switch to the previous/next page. Equivalently, arrow buttons will be displayed at the end of each page, doing the same thing.
• There is a menu on the left (not shown by default on small screen, use the top-left button to show it) that allows you to quickly jump to any page of the course. Note, however, that the course material is designed to be read in order.
• With the magnifying glass icon in the top-left corner, or the “S” keyboard shortcut, you can open a search bar that lets you look up content by keywords.