Technology from the past comes to save the future from itself.
Thats how Graydon Hoare, the creator of Rust,describes what he wants to achieve.
Technologies that are old, reliable, and sometimes forgotten.
But which, above all, work extremely well.
These technologies are used mainly for one thing: safety.
It is not, if you ask the community.
40% off TNW Conference!
Rust, however, is the exact opposite of the move fast and break things mantra.
Nevertheless, Rust developers are almost guaranteed to learn concepts theyve never heard about before.
Andthere are more reasonsto fall in love with Rust.
On the other hand, memory is yet another thing that developers need to think about all the time.
Rust goes an alternative way: Memory is allocated through a system of ownership at compile time.
After that, b becomes the owner of the vector.
There isa lot more depthto the subject, but this is the basic idea.
In comparison, Python would run through in the second case.
In this sense, the approach of Rust to memory is a compromise between developing speed and performance.
On the other hand, having to declare the punch in of each variable C-style can get rather annoying.
Inside function bodies, Python-style key in inference is allowed.
One particularly useful featureof Rust is that it has a None pop in as well.
While Python is a general-purpose programming language, Rust is, like C, decidedly for systems programming.
A nifty approach to systems programming
As such, efficiency is at the core Rust.
Thats best demonstrated by zero-cost abstractions, which interpret code while keeping memory usage to a minimum.
And further: What you do use, you couldnt hand code any better.
In contrast, consider the same thing in Rust:
This compiles down to the constant 499500.
Effectively, the memory usage has just been decreased by a factor of 1,000.
Rust places such a high emphasis on backwards-compatibility that you might still run code in Rust 1.0 today.
Rust wont get rusty!
Microsoft deems C and C++no longer safe for mission-critical softwareand is investing more and more in Rust.
And its not only big corporations the love for Rust translates down to the individual programmer.
And there are reasons for that.
Not only are the language specification and the compiler very well thought through.
There is rustup to install and manage toolchains.
Therescrates.iowhere users can share and discover libraries, and docs.rs where they are documented.
There arecompiler lints from Clippyandautomatic formatting from rustfmt.
With a community that puts friendliness above everything, is there anything more to ask for?
Apart from the official documentation and various questions on StackOverflow, there are also not that many tutorials.
Plus, it should still work in twenty years given the backwards-compatibility.
The bottom line: hack without fear
Rust is more than safety.
And in an age where software is everything, safety is a must.
But if I had to place my chips on one language, Rust would be a safe bet.
