First, you need to get a copy of Rust! There's one catch though: you'll need to get exactly the correct version of Rust. Unfortunately, for OS development, we need to take advantage of some cutting-edge features that aren't yet stable.

Luckily, the Rust project has a tool that makes it easy to switch between Rust versions: rustup. You can get it from the install page of the Rust website.

By default, rustup uses stable Rust. So let's tell it to install nightly:

$ rustup update nightly

This installs the current version of nightly Rust. We run all of the examples in this book under continunous integration, so we should know if something changes in nightly Rust and breaks. But please file bugs if something doesn't work.

Then, execute this:

$ rustup override add nightly

This sets up rustup to switch to the Rust we need whenever we're in this directory. Nice and easy. We can't get the version wrong; rustup handles it for us.