Introduction
Welcome to The Rust Programming Language, an introductory book about Rust. The Rust programming language helps you write faster, more reliable software. High-level ergonomics and low-level control are often at odds in programming language design; Rust challenges that conflict. Through balancing powerful technical capacity and a great developer experience, Rust gives you the option to control low-level details (such as memory usage) without all the hassle traditionally associated with such control.
Rust used for?
Rust is ideal for many people for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at a few of the most important groups.
- Teams of Developers
- Students
- Companies
- Open Source Developers
Teams of Developers
Rust is proving to be a productive tool for collaborating among large teams of developers with varying levels of systems programming knowledge. Low-level code is prone to a variety of subtle bugs, which in most other languages can be caught only through extensive testing and careful code review by experienced developers. In Rust, the compiler plays a gatekeeper role by refusing to compile code with these elusive bugs, including concurrency bugs. By working alongside the compiler, the team can spend their time focusing on the program’s logic rather than chasing down bugs.
Rust also brings contemporary developer tools to the systems programming world:
- Cargo, the included dependency manager and build tool, makes adding, compiling, and managing dependencies painless and consistent across the Rust ecosystem.
- Rustfmt ensures a consistent coding style across developers.
- The Rust Language Server powers Integrated Development Environment (IDE) integration for code completion and inline error messages.
By using these and other tools in the Rust ecosystem, developers can be productive while writing systems-level code.
Students
Rust is for students and those who are interested in learning about systems concepts. Using Rust, many people have learned about topics like operating systems development. The community is very welcoming and happy to answer student questions. Through efforts such as this book, the Rust teams want to make systems concepts more accessible to more people. Especially those new to programming.
Companies
Hundreds of companies, large and small, use Rust in production for a variety of tasks. So Those tasks include command line tools, web services, DevOps tooling, embedded devices, audio and video analysis and transcoding, cryptocurrencies, bioinformatics, search engines, Internet of Things applications, machine learning, and even major parts of the Firefox web browser.
Open Source Developers
Rust is for people who want to build the Rust programming language, community, developer tools, and libraries. We’d love to have you contribute to the Rust language.
People Who Value Speed and Stability
Rust is for people who crave speed and stability in a language. By speed, we mean the speed of the programs that you can create with Rust and the speed at which Rust lets you write them. The Rust compiler’s checks ensure stability through feature additions and refactoring. This is in contrast to the brittle legacy code in languages without these checks. Which developers are often afraid to modify. By striving for zero-cost abstractions, higher-level features that compile to lower-level code as fast as code written manually, Rust endeavors to make safe code be fast code as well.
The Rust language hopes to support many other users as well; those mentioned here are merely some of the biggest stakeholders. Overall, Rust’s greatest ambition is to eliminate the trade-offs that programmers have accepted for decades by providing safety and productivity, speed and ergonomics. Give Rust a try and see if its choices work for you.
Rust’s growing popularity
According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 conducted among nearly 65,000 developers, Also Rust is the most beloved programming language. And it won the title for the fifth year running.
Also in 2020, Linux kernel developers proposed writing new Linux kernel code in Rust. To be clear, they did not want to rewrite the entire Kernel, which was originally written in C, but to add new code in Rust that would work with the existing infrastructure. No less a figure than Linus Thorvalds, the father of the open-source operating system Linux, welcomed the idea and is keen to see the results of the project.
Moreover, Google is also planning to use Rust in the Linux kernel after bringing support for the systems programming language Rust to Android. The entire operation is aimed at reducing security flaws. Microsoft, meanwhile, has turned to Rust to reduce memory-related bugs in Windows components.
Facebook has also forged closer ties with Rust, joining the Rust Foundation. An organization created in 2021 to drive the development of Rust and make it “a mainstream language of choice for systems programming and beyond. Facebook joins Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla in using Rust in some capacity.
All these are clear signs that Rust has been gaining traction in the past few years. But is it just another hype technology that promises a lot, but will soon vanish?
What is so special about Rust language?
Rust is a statically-typed programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency and memory management. Its syntax is similar to that of C++. It is an open-source project developed originally at Mozilla Research. In 2021, the Rust Foundation has taken the torch and is driving the development of the language.
Rust solves problems that C/C++ developers have been struggling with for a long time: memory errors and concurrent programming. This is seen as its main benefit.
Of course, one can argue that modern C++ is putting greater emphasis on memory safety (e.g. by implementing smart pointers), but many problems remain unresolved. One of them is ‘use after free errors,’ which happen when a program continues to use a pointer after it has been freed, e.g. calling the lambda function after freeing its reference captured objects.
In Rust, on the other hand, you have the borrow checker—the part of the compiler that ensures that references do not outlive the data to which they refer. This feature helps you eliminate memory violation bugs. Such problems are detected at the compile time, and garbage collection is unnecessary.
Additionally, in Rust, each reference has a lifetime, where you can set the scope for which that reference is valid. This feature solves the problem with references that are no longer valid, and also distinguishes Rust from C and C++. .
Is Rust object-oriented?
Who knows what object-oriented means nowadays?
The answer is not really. Rust has some object-oriented features: you can create structs, and they can contain both data and associated methods on that data, which is kind of similar to classes minus inheritance. But in contrast to languages like Java, Rust doesn’t have inheritance and uses traits to achieve polymorphism instead.
Conclusion
Therefore in this Article I explained the Rust programming language and every thing about that.