Tooling

Titus Winters (Google's C++ library lead) describes software engineering as programming integrated over time, or sometimes as programming integrated over time and people. Over longer timescales, and a wider team, there's more to a codebase than just the code held within it.

Modern languages, including Rust, are aware of this and come with an ecosystem of tooling that goes way beyond just converting the program into executable binary code (the compiler).

This chapter explores the Rust tooling ecosystem, with a general recommendation to make use of all of this infrastructure. Obviously, doing so needs to be proportionate—setting up CI, documentation builds, and six types of test would be overkill for a throwaway program that is run only twice. But for most of the things described in this chapter, there's lots of "bang for the buck": a little bit of investment into tooling integration will yield worthwhile benefits.