evcxr_jupyter provides Rust execution in Quarto

I recently learned that setting up Rust execution in Quarto is easy via evcxr_jupyter.

The first thing you need to do is ensure that Rust is installed. See Install Rust.

Tip

It doesn’t hurt to run rustup update if you have not updated in a while.

Then you can use Cargo to install the relevant crate. Expect this step to take a while.

$ cargo install evcxr_jupyter

Then, if necessary, add the executable evcxr_jupyter to PATH. On Debian-based Linux put the following in your .bashrc file

export PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin/

and run source .bashrc.

Then use the binary to install the Jupyter tool.

evcxr_jupyter --install

At this point it should be installed. You’ll see a Rust kernel will be available when you use jupyter notebook and Quarto will similarly recognize Rust code in {rust} as being executable. Start with something like a “Hello, World” example. You’ll find that in the Rust REPL you will not need to specify main {...}.

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, World.");
}

Hello, World.

You can control the code echo by using //| echo: true and //| echo: false near the beginning of the code block.