Install Rust and CMake on an Intel MacBook

01 Oct 2021

A reproducible record of how to install Rust and CMake on macOS. Rust is a memory-safe system programming language that has gained popularity over recent years. CMake is a cross-platform, compiler-independent, and open-source build system generator.

Table of Contents

• macOS Rust Installation
  • My First Rust Program
• macOS CMake Installation

macOS Rust Installation

It is suggested to use rustup as it will (among other things) allow us to switch between versions of Rust without having to download anything additional:

# Follow this link: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Or, we can simply do:

brew install rustup

After a while, we should see a prompt:

1) Proceed with installation (default)
2) Customize installation
3) Cancell installation
>

We can just choose 1 and follow the default installation process. If in the former step we use Homebrew to install rustup, we need to run:

rustup-init

If everything goes well, we can restart the terminal window and check the version of Rust installed on our machine:

lochlomond:~$ rustup --version
rustup 1.25.2 (2023-02-01)
info: This is the version for the rustup toolchain manager, not the rustc compiler.
info: The currently active `rustc` version is `rustc 1.67.1 (d5a82bbd2 2023-02-07)`
lochlomond:~$ rustc --version
rustc 1.67.1 (d5a82bbd2 2023-02-07)
lochlomond:~$ cargo --version
cargo 1.67.1 (8ecd4f20a 2023-01-10)

Now, we should see two newly created directories inside our $HOME directory: .cargo and .rustup. Of course we can move them into another directory, e.g., $HOME/Library/Rust. To make that happen, we need to overwrite the default values of certain environment variables in our .bash_profile:

# Add Rust
export CARGO_HOME=$HOME/Library/Rust/.cargo
export RUSTUP_HOME=$HOME/Library/Rust/.rustup
export PATH="$CARGO_HOME/bin:$PATH"
. "$CARGO_HOME/env"

We can observe their locations as shown below:

lochlomond:~$ which rustc
/Users/xingjianxuanyuan/Library/Rust/.cargo/bin/rustc
lochlomond:~$ which rustup
/Users/xingjianxuanyuan/Library/Rust/.cargo/bin/rustup
lochlomond:~$ which cargo
/Users/xingjianxuanyuan/Library/Rust/.cargo/bin/cargo

My First Rust Program

This example is taken from Mara Bos, Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice, O’Reilly, 2023.

use std::thread;

fn main() {
    let t1 = thread::spawn(f);
    let t2 = thread::spawn(f);

    println!("Hello from the main thread.");

    t1.join().unwrap();
    t2.join().unwrap();
}

fn f() {
    println!("Hello from another thread!");

    let id = thread::current().id();
    println!("This is my thread id: {id:?}");
}

The standard library’s std::thread::spawn function¹ takes a single argument: the function the thread to be spawned will execute. The thread stops once this function returns. We let both spawned threads print a message and show their thread ID, which is a unique identifier for each thread and is of type ThreadID. The println macro uses std::io::Stdout::lock() to make sure its output does not get interrupted. A println!() expression will wait until any concurrently running one is finished before writing any output. The .join() method waits until the thread has finished executing and returns a std::thread::Result. The .unwrap() method handles the situation when the thread did not successfully finish its function because it panicked.

$ rustc hello.rs
$ ./hello
Hello from the main thread.
Hello from another thread!
This is my thread id: ThreadId(3)
Hello from another thread!
This is my thread id: ThreadId(2)

macOS CMake Installation

I include below a copy of the instructions found here for easy future reference. All the credit goes to Frederico Martins.

If we already have CMake installed, we should first do the following:

sudo find /usr/local/bin -type l -lname '/Applications/CMake.app/*' -delete

sudo rm -rf /Applications/CMake.app

The official download page of CMake is here. We can choose the version we would like to install and copy the corresponding link:

mkdir ~/Downloads/CMake

# The latest release is 3.25.2
curl --silent --location --retry 3 "https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.25.2/cmake-3.25.2-Darwin-x86_64.dmg" --output ~/Downloads/CMake/cmake-Darwin-x86_64.dmg

Mount the downloaded installation image using the following command:

yes | PAGER=cat hdiutil attach -quiet -mountpoint /Volumes/cmake-Darwin-x86_64 ~/Downloads/CMake/cmake-Darwin-x86_64.dmg

Copy CMake.app to the /Applications folder:

cp -R /Volumes/cmake-Darwin-x86_64/CMake.app /Applications/

Unmount the image:

hdiutil detach /Volumes/cmake-Darwin-x86_64

Add the CMake tool to the $PATH variable:

sudo "/Applications/CMake.app/Contents/bin/cmake-gui" --install=/usr/local/bin

Verify our installation:

lochlomond:~$ cmake --version
cmake version 3.25.2

CMake suite maintained and supported by Kitware (kitware.com/cmake).

Finally, we can remove the downloaded installation image:

rm -rf ~/Downloads/CMake

Last updated: 2023-02-02