Computer programmers have never had it so good. There are thousands of programming languages to choose from, allowing you to create code that is elegant, efficient, and even formatted like a Shakespeare play, if you want. Despite this, professional coders typically rely on proven languages like Python or C due to project limitations, extensive documentation, and ease of maintenance. However, Rust is now one of the most popular programming languages in the world and looks set to oust some of its old competitors.
Rust isn’t just a newcomer: it was created by a Mozilla employee named Grayden Hoare in 2006, and has since gained some very powerful backers. It is officially sponsored by Amazon Web Services and Google now supports Rust libraries in Chromium and Android. It’s also loved by programmers themselves, earning it the title of Stack Overflow’s “Most Admired Programming Language” for nine years in a row. So far so good, but why are people flocking to Rust in such large numbers?
Rust makes memory safety its top priority
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When Rust was created, C and C++ were two of the go-to languages for professional coders. Unfortunately, they were also memory dangerous, meaning the programmer had to account for potential memory problems in advance. Failure to do so could result in errors or unexpected behavior that is difficult to reproduce, and even more difficult to correct. For example, attempting to access the fifth element of a four-element array may crash the program or return data that should not be accessible. This is a huge problem, especially if you’re dealing with sensitive information, which is why both languages have made incremental improvements to memory security since then.
Rust, on the other hand, was created from the ground up to be a memory-safe language. If you write code that might cause problems, it will simply fail to compile. For example, Rust’s borrow checker will not allow you to have immutable and mutable references at the same time, unless you use the “unsafe” keyword, which allows you to bypass Rust’s memory safety rules. This immediately eliminates dangling pointers, buffer overflows, and use-after-free errors. Best of all, Rust automatically frees memory as soon as a value goes out of scope, so you don’t even have to think about that side of things and can concentrate on the code itself.
Rust encourages good habits and is just as fast as its biggest rivals
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Like C and C++, Rust is a highly portable language, meaning its code can run on a wide variety of different systems. Unlike many of its predecessors, Rust offers descriptive and helpful error messages that actually tell you why something isn’t working. This means that beginning programmers are more likely to understand the root cause of problems and rely less on community forums or AI-powered coding tools when things go wrong. Additionally, Rust’s guardrails force users to write memory-safe code, which is excellent preparation for later learning languages like C or C++.
One of the reasons C and C++ are still so widely used is that they are extremely fast, but understand this: Rust offers about the same level of performance. That’s huge considering it’s also newer, safer, and more beginner-friendly than its competitors. The difference is even more striking if your preferred language is Python, with Rust estimated to be between 10 and 100 times faster.
In other words, there is finally a widely used alternative to existing languages that doesn’t compromise speed. Rust is more popular than ever, but it still has a long way to go if it wants to overthrow C, Java, C++, or Python. That said, its rapid adoption could mean a seismic shift in the software development industry happens sooner than expected.
