Compiling and running rust without Cargo - a shell script

In the Hello World article we first saw an example compiling some Rust code using rustc and then running the resulting binary manually. I mentioned it is not really the common way to compile and run rust and then we saw how to use Cargo for that.

However, and I guess this might be slightly controversial, as I experiment with Rust I write lots of small programs. As long as I don't use an external crates, I don't really need to use cargo. I can just do the compilation and running as above.

But I am lazy and I have written way too much perl and python code to be able to execute two commands just to compile and run my code.

So I wrote a small Bash script that will do the two steps for me.

examples/rust.sh

#!/usr/bin/bash -e

if [ "$1" == "" ];
then
    echo "Usage: $0 path/to/file.rs"
    exit 1
fi

# rustc $1
# name=$(basename $1 .rs)
# ./$name

rustc $1 -o myexe
shift
if [ -f myexe ];
then
    ./myexe $*
    \rm myexe
fi

I'd use it like this:

cd examples
./rust.sh hello.rs

It will compile the Rust file and call the binary file myexe, then it will try to run that program.

Here is the Hello World program in case you'd like to try it.

examples/hello.rs

fn main() {
    println!("Hello World");
}

Conclusion

I know it does not have a lot of uses and I am sure there are various issues with this script, but it is quite useful for me. Maybe you can use the idea and even improve on it.