Rust StuCo Homeworks

All homeworks are due the week after they are assigned, unless you use late days. You have 7 late days to use whenever you need.

Homeworks

We've' tried to calibrate each of the homeworks to take around an hour. If you find yourself spending much more than an hour on these, please let us know! This is the first time these assignments have been handed out, and we are very open to feedback regarding the length and difficulty.

Setup

Make sure you have Rust installed. You should have installed Rust through rustup. To confirm, run:

$ rustup --version
rustup 1.27.1 (54dd3d00f 2024-04-24)
$ cargo --version
cargo 1.81.0 (2dbb1af80 2024-08-20)

Make sure that both of those commands execute successfully, and that they have relatively recent dates. If the dates are not recent, you can update rustup by running rustup update.

If you want a local version of this writeup, you can generate it with cargo doc. Once you have cargo installed, run cargo doc --open in this directory to generate documentation for this homework.

$ cargo doc --open
Documenting primerlab v0.1.0 (<path>/primerlab)
   Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.11s
    Opening <path>/primerlab/target/doc/primerlab/index.html

Either way, a version of this writeup will be up on our website!

Submission

Formatting and Style

The autograder will run these two commands on your code:

cargo clippy && cargo fmt --all -- --check

If the autograder detects any errors from the command above, you will not be able to receive any points. This may seem strict, but we have decided to follow standard best practices for Rust.

By following Rust's style guidelines, you ensure that anybody reading your code (who is familiar with Rust) will be able to easily navigate your code. This can help with diving into an unfamiliar code base, and it also eliminates the need for debate with others over style rules, saving time and energy.

See the official guidelines for more information.

Unix

If you are on a unix system, we will try to create a handin.zip automatically for you, but you will need to have zip already installed.

If you do not have zip installed on your system, install zip on your machine or use the CMU Linux SSH machines. If you need help with this, please reach out to us!

Once you have zip installed, we will create the handin.zip automatically for you (take a peek into build.rs if you're interested in how this works!).

Once you have the handin.zip file, submit it to Gradescope.

Windows

If you are on a windows system, you can zip the src/ folder manually and upload that to Gradescope.

Note that you don't need to name it handin.zip, you can name it whatever you'd like.

Collaboration

In general, feel free to discuss homeworks with other students! As long as you do not copy someone else's work, any communication is fair game.

All formal questions should be asked on Piazza. Try to discuss on Piazza so that other students can see your questions and answers as well!

You can also discuss on Discord, but try to keep any technical questions on Piazza.

Feedback

We would like to reiterate that you should let us know if you spent anywhere in significant excess of an hour on this homework.

In addition, Rust has a notoriously steep learning curve, so if you find yourself not understanding the concepts, you should reach out to us and let us know as well --- chances are, you're not the only one!