Perform baseline testing

Overview

Now that Rust is installed, verify the installation, build functionality, and compilation performance on your Arm-based Axion C4A instance.

Create a sample Rust program

Create and build a simple “Hello, World” application to verify that Rust is working correctly:

    

        
        
mkdir rust-baseline
cd rust-baseline
cargo new hello
cd hello
cargo run

    

This creates a new Rust project and runs it immediately. The cargo new hello command generates a default Rust project with the necessary files including main.rs and Cargo.toml.

The output is similar to:

    

        
           Compiling hello v0.1.0 (/home/gcpuser/rust-baseline/hello)
    Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.19s
     Running `target/debug/hello`
Hello, world!

        
    

This confirms that Rust and Cargo are properly configured on your Arm64 VM.

Measure compilation performance

Use the time command to measure compilation performance on the Arm64 processor:

    

        
        
cargo clean
time cargo build

    

The cargo clean command removes all build artifacts, ensuring you measure a complete compilation from scratch.

The output is similar to:

    

        
        Removed 21 files, 7.7MiB total
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (/home/gcpuser/rust-baseline/hello)
    Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.14s

real    0m0.186s
user    0m0.118s
sys     0m0.071s

        
    

The timing results show that Rust compilation performs well on the Arm64 architecture, with the “real” time indicating the total elapsed time for the build process.

What you’ve accomplished and what’s next

You’ve successfully verified your Rust installation and measured baseline compilation performance on the C4A instance. In the next section, you’ll benchmark Rust code execution using Criterion to measure runtime performance and consistency.