Rust Best Practices

Comprehensive guide for writing high-quality, idiomatic, and highly optimized Rust code. Contains 269 rules across 26 categories, prioritized by impact to guide LLMs in code generation and refactoring. Current for Rust 1.96 (2024 edition).

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

• Writing new Rust functions, structs, or modules
• Implementing error handling or async code
• Writing concurrent, parallel, or unsafe code
• Designing public APIs for libraries
• Reviewing code for ownership/borrowing issues
• Optimizing memory usage or reducing allocations
• Tuning performance for hot paths
• Refactoring existing Rust code

Rule Categories by Priority

Quick Reference

See references/quick-reference.md for the full list of 269 rules across 26 categories, linked to individual rule files.

Recommended Cargo.toml Settings

[profile.release]
opt-level = 3
lto = "fat"
codegen-units = 1
panic = "abort"
strip = true

[profile.bench]
inherits = "release"
debug = true
strip = false

[profile.dev]
opt-level = 0
debug = true

[profile.dev.package."*"]
opt-level = 3  # Optimize dependencies in dev

How to Use

This skill provides rule identifiers for quick reference. When generating or reviewing Rust code:

1. Check relevant category based on task type
2. Apply rules with matching prefix
3. Prioritize CRITICAL > HIGH > MEDIUM > LOW
4. Read rule files in references/ for detailed examples

Rule Application by Task

Sources & Attribution

This skill is an independent synthesis of official Rust guidance, well-known books, and patterns from widely-used crates. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Rust project or any crate author; the text and code examples are original.

Official Rust documentation

• The Rust Reference
• Rust API Guidelines
• The Rustonomicon (unsafe code)
• Rust 2024 Edition Guide
• The Cargo Book
• Standard library docs and release notes

Books & guides

• The Rust Performance Book — Nicholas Nethercote
• Rust Design Patterns — rust-unofficial
• Rust Atomics and Locks — Mara Bos
• Effective Rust — David Drysdale

Tooling

• Clippy lint documentation
• Miri

Real-world codebases studied for idioms

• ripgrep, tokio, serde, clap, polars, axum, cargo, hyper, bevy, rayon, and dtolnay's crates (thiserror, anyhow, syn)

This project is MIT-licensed. Referenced upstream materials remain under their own licenses (the official Rust docs and API Guidelines are dual MIT / Apache-2.0).