Why does rustc not run my simple "hello world" program?

Question

I just set up Rust according to the doc and created my first program.

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

I saved it as main.rs and kicked off using:

[root@localhost hello_world] rustc main.rs
[root@localhost hello_world] 

But no output ever appears. Running rustc --version does show the version number, so considering the install went without problem, I am wondering where the problem is.

Answer 1

Rust is a compiled language. rustc is the compiler, which takes a source file and produces a binary which can then be executed; it does not itself execute the code, however. You must take the binary it produces (by default, the source filename minus the .rs extension) and execute it yourself with ./main or similar.

If you use Cargo, there is cargo run which compiles the code if necessary and then runs it.