The Rust Programming Language — Introduction
Let’s learn about the brief history of how the Rust programming language originated.
Rust is a powerful programming language that has come into highlight in the past 7–8 years.
But after having series of lay-offs, this project was taken off the burner and put on the side. Until few years later, there was interest shown in this programming language by many big players like Microsoft and Google.
The Rust Programming Language, as per their website, has a motto of:
A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
We will discuss following things?
- What is Rust?
- Who uses Rust?
- Why & why not use Rust?
What is rust?
Rust is a powerful programming language focusing on building reliable and efficient software. It allows you to write code which is very close to low level mean while maintaining abstraction of a high level programming language.
Compilation
Rust can compile the code in either Machile Level Code or Web Assembly which can run on browser.
Machine level code can be run as an app on Mac/Linux/Windows.
Who uses Rust?
Mozilla, Microsoft, Dropbox have been using Rust along with Lesser known organisations using Rust building OS like Tock, Bevy, Redox, etc.
You can find full list of the usages below:
https://www.rust-lang.org/production
There is a lot of diversities in the usage of Rust.
What can you build with Rust?
- Web servers
- Command-Line Interfaces
- Native desktop applications
- In-browser apps via WebAssembly
- Performance-intensive libraries
- Operating systems
WebAssembly will not be working on older browsers.
You can witness the power of Rust here: https://makepad.dev
Why use Rust?
- Speed
- Performance
- Going real fast
Theme is unlocking maximum speed from your hardware.
Programming languages like C (1972) and C++ (1985) were very efficient. C++ also supported OOP. But Rust, is quite efficient like C and C++ and also it’s reliable and ergonomic.
We’ll come back to these terminologies back again.
Errors in Rust are very much user-friendly as compared to C/C++:
Rust shines where you want C/C++ lefels of performance. Along with this, you also get:
- Nice ergonomics
- A language server
- Automatic memory management
- Package manager
- Code formatter
- Concurrency
- Supports big code bases with confidence via compulation
Why not to use Rust?
- Rust is a big language
- Smaller ecosystem than C/C++
- Rust compiler is strict (satisfying/fighting the compiler)
- Rust has a slower iteration cycle than most languages
- Rust compiler is a bit slow
- Safer than C++
- Less safe than pure functional programming
It is:
the most loved programming language in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023…
Let’s get started with Primitives in Rust. We will start with Primitives — String.
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