Pro-tips for Rust Development 🦀 (for Substrate builders)

Question

Please add your pro-tips in the answers below!

There are a few things you learn along the way when building in our ecosystem. A page that is focused on a few key things would help new users accelerate and make their dev day-to-day work more fun 💃🕺

Key topics:

• IDEs and tooling
  • https://rust-analyzer.github.io/
    • How to get Substrate working (macro issues
• Cargo extensions
  • https://lib.rs/crates/cargo-expand for macro understanding
  • https://lib.rs/crates/cargo-multi for lots of sub-dir actions (like clean && build on updating toolchains)
  • https://lib.rs/crates/cargo-sweep for nuanced build cleanups to get space back and faster builds
• Build & Test & Deploy Automation
  • CI-CD examples

More topics? Please comment/answer!

Answer 1

Maybe obvious, but wasn't for me when I started:

Compiling just a specific crate:

cargo build -p pallet-balances

Running just a specific test:

> cargo test -p pallet-balances lock_block_number_extension_should_work

running 2 tests
test tests_composite::lock_block_number_extension_should_work ... ok
test tests_local::lock_block_number_extension_should_work ... ok

test result: ok. 2 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 121 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

Answer 2

An AMD 7950X desktop with a 7Gb/s SSD would be my current pro tip. I'm on the previous generation (5950X) but it cuts through substrate and polkadot builds like a hot knife through butter. The only time that it's slow is when doing cargo --profile production which I would only recommend doing for benchmarking or for final release builds as the linking takes a long time. 99% of the time --release is fine, and for that a large number of cores gets well utilised.