By the end of this piece, you’ll understand why hundreds of other people believe Rust is the best programming language available.
Software complexity rises with time as more features are expected in a shorter amount of time, and tolerance for faults decreases as standards rise. New programming languages and libraries appear, and while they occasionally enhance things, they mainly merely keep things the same. By the end of this piece, you’ll understand why hundreds of other people believe Rust is the best programming language available.
So, what exactly is Rust?
Rust is a super-efficient, super-secure, and super-fast programming language that defies the trend of incremental gains. Not only that, but it goes one step further: it alters your perspective on software development.
Some people (Andrei included) believe that Rust is the ideal programming language love child, combining the strength of C++ with the safety of Java or other interpreted languages.
These are the 5 top reasons why you should learn Rust:
1. Puts Developers First
Rust prioritises developers by offering capabilities that make software development more efficient and dependable. This includes maintenance, which is an important component of the lifecycle of a project. Rust prioritises developers by offering capabilities that make software development more efficient and dependable. This includes maintenance, which is an important component of the lifecycle of a project. The Rust ecosystem is at the heart of the Rust development process. On crates.io, there are tens of thousands of crates (a crate is a Rust code library), all with auto-generated documentation.
2. Dependable Code
Errors with null pointers? Nah. Problems with the runtime reappearing six months later? Nope. Getting up at 2 a.m. for an emergency hotfix? Rust isn’t like that. Rust programmes are built on the foundation of reliability, which is why Rust is the language of the future.
3. WebAssembly (Wasm)
What role does Rust play here? Rust is positioned to become the de-facto language for targeting Wasm on the internet. Rust uses very little memory, has no garbage collector, and features Tier 2 Wasm compiler support, as well as a wonderful Wasm packager that can be used with web development workflows like webpack. This enables Rust to fully utilise Wasm in order to achieve significant speedups on computationally intensive web apps.
Because Rust can run on both the backend (natively) and frontend (through Wasm) of online applications, it’s a no-brainer to learn it if you want to build fast, dependable web apps that can be accessed from anywhere and on any device.
4. Industry Support
Rust has a promising future. To keep the Rust project active and in continual development, the Rust Foundation maintains it and guarantees that core contributors are adequately supported.
Microsoft is a founding member, along with Amazon, Google, Huawei, Facebook, and, of course, Mozilla, which was instrumental in the development of the Rust programming language.
5. Proven Track Record
Improving current projects doesn’t always get the same attention as launching a whole new product, so here’s a taste of what’s going on with Rust:
- Rust Linux kernel drivers have recently been added to linux-next, which is the staging area for inclusion in the release kernel. This is significant because the Linux project has only ever accepted C code.
- To address their scale issues, Dropbox redesigned their sync engine in Rust.
- Discord added Rust to their codebase to speed up Member List processing (excellent news for everyone on the ZTM server!)
- To improve the security of billions of devices, Google is creating new Android components in Rust.
Given Rust’s popularity, strong community, industry support, and ability to produce extremely fast and highly efficient applications, now is the best time to learn Rust!
