Basic Types

Rust has a variety of familiar types:

• booleans - bool for representing true/false
• unsigned integers - u8 u16 u32 u64 u128 for representing nonnegative whole numbers
• signed integers - i8 i16 i32 i64 i128 for representing whole numbers
• pointer sized integers - usize isize for representing indexes and sizes of things in memory
• floating point - f32 f64
• characters - char for representing a single Unicode character
• tuple - (value, value, ...) for passing fixed sequences of values on the stack
• arrays - [value, value, ...] a collection of similar elements with fixed length known at compile time
• slices - a collection of similar elements with length known at runtime
• str(string slice) - text with a length known at runtime

Text might be more complex than you are used to in other languages; since Rust is a system programming language, it cares about memory issues you might not be used to. We will be going into this in detail later.

Numeric types can be explicitly specified by appending the type to the end of the number (e.g. 13u32, 2u8).