Rust

Explained

Programming language

Systems language with guaranteed memory safety and no garbage collector. Rapidly growing in popularity.

Rust, explained

Written by EduVerse

Rust is a compiled systems language that aims for the speed of C and C++ without their memory bugs. Its compiler tracks who owns each piece of data and how long references live (the “borrow checker”), so many crashes and data races are caught before the program ever runs.

Why teams use it

Many security holes in C and C++ software come from memory mistakes, and Rust rules most of those out at compile time while still running without a garbage collector. The price is a steep learning curve: expect to fight the compiler for a while before its rules start to feel natural.

An example from work

A colleague recommends ripgrep, a fast search tool, and one of the install options is cargo install ripgrep: it’s written in Rust. Later you try a small Rust program yourself, and cargo build stops with “borrowed value does not live long enough”, which is the borrow checker doing its job.

Our own explanation, not a quote from the book.

In the book

Sentences from The Software Realm, Decoded that mention Rust, exactly as printed.

Senior developer
“Low-level languages like C, C++, and Rust are jet engines.”
Chapter 2 · 2.2 The Languages Ecosystem: Choosing Your Tools · pp. 48–49Open in the free preview

Where it fits

Systems programming, WebAssembly, CLI tools, embedded

Coverage in the book