About Rust

Is it a joke, or does everyone seem to have “rust” in mind these days?

Somehow it got voted the most “loved” language in the 2016 stackoverflow survey. Yet is still missing from the “top”, “trending” or “popular” lists.

Rust In a Nutshell

Rust is…

• designed to be memory safe, and it does not permit null pointers or dangling pointers
• free and open source - dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT

Rust has..

• an object system based around implementations, traits and structured types
• ad-hoc polymorphism
• strong typing
• a reputation for introducing breaking changes and poor documentation

Rust is governed by..

• a core team
• an RFC process
• under an open governance process

Rust implementations..

• a single compiler implementation, written in Rust though originally bootstrapped with OCaml
• the first “stable” version of the Rust, version 1.0.0, was released in May 2015

The Rust ecosystem includes:

• Cargo - dependency manager and build tool
• Rustfmt - coding style enforcement
• The Rust Language Server - IDE integration for code completion and inline error messages

Why Rust?

The goal of Rust is to be a good language for creating highly concurrent and highly safe systems.

Rust solves the three big problems of C/C++ without introducing garbage collection or extensive run-time processing:

• agreement on memory allocation size
• agreement on memory ownership and de-allocation
• agreement on concurrent memory access

Credits and References

• Rust - wikipedia
• Rust GitHub repo
• The Rust Programming Language
• Rust Style Guide
• Rust by Example
• Some notes on Rust, the language.