Why Does Gear Use Rust?

What is Rust?

Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language that’s focused on safety and performance. It was built with speed and efficiency in mind, which means that it can provide zero-cost abstractions and functional features, which for many developers, solves the common problems with other low-level languages like C and C++.

What are the advantages of using Rust?

Rust is amazingly fast and memory efficient. It’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory and thread safety enabling the elimination of many classes of bugs at compile-time.

Zero-cost abstractions make sure that there is virtually no runtime overhead for the abstractions that you use, which essentially means that there are no speed differences between low-level code and one written with abstractions.

On top of this, Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler and provides useful error messages. This helps easily diagnose problems for improved efficiency.

Thanks to these unique benefits, Rust has been voted the “most loved programming language” in the Stack Overview Developer Survey every year since 2016.

How does Rust specifically apply to the cryptocurrency industry?

Unlike other blockchain based programming languages, like Solidity, Rust is not crypto-specific. While it can be used to write smart contracts, Rust is an already mature technology that is primarily used outside of the blockchain industry. If this is the case, then how come Gear chose to use Rust and not another more crypto-specific programming language?

Why does Gear use Rust?

Rust offers zero-cost abstractions and assumes the best practice design and development guidelines as defaults. Programmers only need to be explicit when they have to digress from the best practices. Rust also doesn’t have a garbage collector, which means that there can be no indeterministic incident caused by the language during runtime.

As a result, Rust is very fast and memory efficient, while also maintaining extreme reliability. This makes Rust the ideal choice of programming language for blockchains where reliability and efficiency are very, very important.

The other advantage of using Rust is that it has a straightforward compilation to Wasm, which is the exact architecture that Gear uses. WebAssembly, or Wasm for short, is an innovative way to run applications in programming languages other than JavaScript as web pages. Essentially, Wasm can be used as a virtual machine that runs on all modern browsers, but whereas in the past you were required to use JavaScript to run code in a web page, Wasm makes it possible to run code in browsers with programming languages other than JavaScript. And when compared to other programming languages, Rust is ideally suited for writing code to compile to WebAssembly.

One way that Rust is the ideal programming language for WebAssembly is because of its minimal runtime. As WebAssembly doesn’t have its own runtime, it needs to be shipped with the code. The smaller the runtime, the less stuff the user needs to download. Thankfully Rust has very minimal runtime, meaning that the users can interact with applications extremely fast.

Another way that Rust is ideal for usage with WebAssembly is that since Rust is statically typed, it can compile to a more efficient WebAssembly since the compiler can use the types to optimize the code. Once again this contributes significantly to increased efficiency and speed.

Finally, and arguably most importantly, Rust has embraced WebAssembly like no other programming language has. It already has an amazing community and tooling for compiling to WebAssembly, which makes development and solving bugs and problems that much easier.

We’d like to thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter.