Rust is a low level programming language that is being used for the past seven consecutive years. Many companies of repute use it — Amazon, Dropbox, Meta and Samsung. It is not a difficult language to pick up. Of course, it is verbose and takes more code to develop a feature. It is good for systems programming or low level programming. Linux has accepted it, after C, as an officially supported language. GitHub’s new search engine code is written in Rust. It is a turning point for the language as it functions at GitHub scale. Dell too uses Rust in product solutions.

Rust has been created by Mozilla, the company that developed Firefox. It was to respond to the scalability problems in apps such as web browsers. The Mozilla team worked on coding problems they encountered, and the solution they got was named Rust. In Rust one can write maintainable, scalable and safe code. The code can run for decades quite reliably. Those who have mastered C/C++ learn Rust quickly.

Rust being a low level language (when compared to Python and Java) poses problems of memory management and concurrency. The developers must manage allocation explicitly and prevent multiple pointers from accessing the same memory. It is frustrating for the beginners. The syntax of Rust is also problematic. Being a new language, the eco-system of new libraries and frameworks are being developed continuously. This could be over-whelming for the new comers.

The other languages such as Java, JavaScript and Python have witnessed 25 years of growth. Rust is relatively new, and so there are kinks. The tools are geared to specific use cases, and for new uses, there should be consultation with the community.

All programming languages cannot satisfy the criteria of performance, safety and concurrency. Compromises are made on safety for the sake of performance. Rust is the first mainstream programming language which provides safety while you write performance concurrent code.