Rust
A systems programming language focused on safety and concurrency.
Rust is a compiled systems language whose ownership and borrowing rules let the compiler verify memory safety and data-race freedom without garbage collection. Performance is comparable to C and C++, and Rust code typically runs without the pervasive class of bugs (use-after-free, double-free, data races, buffer overruns, null-pointer dereferences) that have historically plagued C codebases. The cost is a steeper learning curve and longer compilation times than dynamic languages.
Graydon Hoare started the project at Mozilla around 2006; the language hit 1.0 in 2015 and has remained committed to backwards compatibility since. Rust has been governed by the independent Rust Foundation since 2021, with substantial sponsorship from AWS, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Mozilla, Huawei, and others. The combination of a strong core team, a healthy ecosystem, and broad sponsorship has kept the language stable.
Rust has been accepted as a second implementation language for the Linux kernel, alongside C — the first new kernel-language addition in over thirty years. It is used at Cloudflare, Discord, Dropbox, Microsoft (parts of Windows), Amazon (Firecracker and others), Meta, and many smaller companies, particularly for performance-critical infrastructure. The crates.io registry hosts over a hundred thousand published crates.
Install
The recommended installer is rustup: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh Distribution packages also exist: Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install rustc cargo Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install rust cargo
Authors
- Graydon Hoare (creator)
- Rust Foundation and the Rust Project teams