Rust’s fabulous adventure

© Rust Foundation/iStock.

Since 2010, developers have grown ever fonder of Rust, a fast, memory-efficient, and reliable language. It comes with excellent documentation, a top-notch compiler, and several tools to help programmers. An in depth and fascinating article in the reputable MIT Technology Review explains the origin and success of this language that is increasingly replacing C and C++ in advanced computing. As a matter of fact, it’s the third most-used programming language in the Linux kernel, after C and assembly language.

In 2006, Graydon Hoare, a developer employed at Mozilla, came home to find the elevator of his Vancouver high-rise out of order. The software had crashed again, and he faced yet another 21-floor climb. Surely one could come up with a program that was less accident-prone? Hoare was well aware that many of these types of crashes have to do with a program’s memory use, due to bugs that languages such as C++ and C introduce all too easily. He got to work on developing a new computer language that, he hoped, could write small, fast code without memory problems. Seventeen years later, Rust is one of the hottest languages in the world, if not the hottest; no less than 2.8 million coders write in Rust, and companies such as Microsoft and Amazon deem it the way of the future. Go on the beat with Clive Thompson. He might make a “rustacean” out of you:

⇨ MIT Technology Review, Clive Thompson, “How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language.”

2023-02-14