Rust in few words…
Rust was developed and incubated at Mozilla Foundation. Rust primarily focused on developing a memory safe language by default apart from being general purpose, strongly and statically typed language.
The memory safety guarantees were provided by implementing Ownership and Borrowing and Immutability features. Data in Rust is explicitly owned by a single owner at a time, assignments or passing values to functions tend to change the ownership. When ownership changes the original owner(variable) can’t be used.
As a result, there is no need of traditional garbage collection or reference counting as memory can be reclaimed by inserting the reclamation code in the compile time.
Rust also provides most of the features provided by modern programming languages. Some features that standout for me are, enum pattern matching with match clause, enum Result wraps data and error. Rust also boasts of strong generics and traits ecosystem. Rust similar to C++ has a concept of smart pointers which own the data they point to.
Apart from, core libraries, Rust comes with rich ecosystem called Crates. For instance, in order to use async functionality we rely on external crate called Tokio. Rust also comes with built in dependency manager called Cargo.
Due to the inbuilt strictness to provide the memory safety guarantees, Rust has a steep learning curve and also sometimes low velocity for feature development. Rust also has slower compile time as compared to other programming languages.
All in all, if you overcome initial hinderance of so call “steep learning curve”, Rust is a great programming language primarily for it’s memory safety guarantees.
