Created by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla Research with contributions from others, Rust is known for offering high performance and safety – especially safe concurrency. This multi-paradigm programming language is syntactically similar to C++. The difference here is that Rust offers assured memory safety. It does so without garbage collection, and reference counting is not mandatory. It has gained increasing popularity in industry, and Microsoft has been experimenting with the language for secure and safety-critical software components. It has also been voted the “most loved programming language” in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey every year since 2016. Today its users include companies such as Dropbox. It is said that this reputation can be traced to the fact that Rust has an advantage over many other languages, tempered with just a few downsides.
For instance, Rust installations come with Cargo, a command line tool to manage dependencies, run tests, generate documentation, and more. And with dependencies, tests, and documentation available by default, their usage is common. Moreover, aside from the built-in tools, the Rust community has come up with many development tools. It is easy to carry out bench marking, fuzzing and property-based testing in Rust-based projects. The Rust community support is strong too, as it can be accessed through chat, the user’s forum, the Rust subeditor, and Stack Overflow questions and answers and chatroom. That said, Rust’s strong type system and focus on memory safety make it fairly common to get errors while compiling one’s code. Also, with Mozilla laying off many of its employees from the Rust team in August 2020, some say its future could be in trouble, although there are no clear signs about this. For more information,
visit https://www.rust-lang.org/.
