Introducing Rust: The Programming Language
Rust is an Iron Oxide formed by the redox reaction between Iron and Oxygen in the presence of water or air…what! That’s not the rust that I am talking about.
Mozilla have been sponsoring research and development of a systems programming language called Rust. To be honest, I had never heard of Rust before until last week. You also probably didn’t until this moment. And do you know why? I will tell you why; the most recent stable release of the Rust Compiler came out only 19 days ago. Plus it is highly used as a ML programming language and if it were not from all the publicity from the folk at Silicon Valley, ML programming languages would still be geek reserves.
Rust was Graydon Hoare’s personal project from 2006 while he worked at Mozilla.He stated that the project’s name was inspired by the fungi family, rust(rust, the fungi, usually affects healthy and vigorously growing plants…I thought you should know.)In 2009, Mozilla started sponsoring the project and on January 2012 the first numbered pre-alpha version of the Rust Compiler was released. The compiler was written in Rust and get this, and I quote, “It compiled itself!”. Initially, the compiler that was being used was written in OCaml. In 2013, Graydon Hoare stepped down as the technical lead in charge of Rust.
Apart from taking a lot of inspiration from ML languages, Rust also shares a lot of similarity with C and C++. Even though they share a similar syntax, it should be noted that not all C or C++ keywords have been implemented. Users of C or/and C++ will also have to get accustomed to new keywords in Rust such as match. It should also be noted that almost every part of a function body of Rust is an expression, including control flow operators.
Originally published at newtonthemaker.wordpress.com on September 18, 2017.
