Rust, the language of the future?

Developer responsability #

Developers are not the best at keeping track of memory usage; having the garbage collector helps us not to think about that task. Rust has a different approach called ownership which is checked at compile time instead of execution time like a garbage collector does, impacting your application’s overall performance.

Having Rust on our side taking care of common bugs is amazing (but not perfect), there are still bugs that Rust cannot detect, but taking bugs that come from undefined behavior (like memory bugs) out of the table is amazing.

Great features #

We have talked about safety (thanks to the ownership system) but Rust is also optimized for speed, helping you to write efficient code.

Also, Rust is equipped for parallelism, which nowadays is more than a common programming technique. Computers now are parallel so thinking sequentially sometimes doesn’t fit the demand. The same ownership system used for memory management helps you to avoid common mistakes forcing you to use properly concurrent tools like mutexes, atomics, among others.

Popularity #

Accoring to Rust’s Blog, the popularity of Rust continues to going up and according to Stackoverflow’s Survey Rust is one of the most admired and desired languages for 8 years.

Also Github confirms that Rust is continously attracting more developers growing 40% YoY.

Next steps? #

Learning a new language is not a 5 minutes task, even if you learn it you need to practice it and face real challenges to get better. There is no specific path to learn it but these are a few resources to help you put on track.

• Rust by example
• Rust book
• Programming Rust
• Effective Rust
• Excersism