What is Rust?

Rust is a programming language that is designed to be safe, fast, and concurrent. It is a systems programming language that is used to build low-level software. It is a statically typed language that is compiled to machine code. It is a language that is used to build operating systems, browsers, and other low-level software.

This blog post summarizes the key takeaways about the origins of Rust and its usefulness in software development MIT Technology Review: How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

Why Rust?

There are several reasons why one might choose to use Rust as their programming language:

  1. Performance: Rust is a systems programming language that is designed to be fast and efficient. Its focus on memory safety and low-level control makes it well-suited for developing high-performance applications.

  2. Memory safety: Rust’s ownership and borrowing model allows for strict compile-time checks that prevent common memory-related bugs such as null pointer dereferences, buffer overflows, and use-after-free errors. This can significantly reduce the occurrence of runtime crashes and security vulnerabilities.

  3. Concurrency: Rust has built-in support for concurrency and parallelism, making it well-suited for developing scalable and efficient applications.

  4. Community: Rust has a growing and active community that provides a wealth of libraries, tools, and resources for developers. This community is committed to open-source development and creating a safe and inclusive space for programmers.

  5. Cross-platform support: Rust supports a wide range of platforms, including Linux, macOS, Windows, and many embedded systems. This makes it a versatile choice for developing applications that need to run on different platforms.

Overall, Rust is a modern programming language that offers a unique combination of performance, safety, concurrency, and community support. It’s an excellent choice for developing systems-level software, performance-critical applications, and any project that requires both speed and safety.

What is Rust used for?

Rust is a systems programming language that is well-suited for developing high-performance, concurrent, and safe applications. Here are some of the common use cases for Rust:

  1. Systems programming: Rust is often used for developing operating systems, device drivers, file systems, and other low-level software that require direct access to hardware.

  2. Web development: Rust is increasingly being used for web development, particularly for building back-end services and APIs. Rust’s strong typing, memory safety, and concurrency features make it a good fit for developing fast and reliable web applications.

  3. Game development: Rust’s performance and memory safety features make it well-suited for developing high-performance game engines and libraries.

  4. Network programming: Rust’s support for concurrency and asynchronous I/O make it a good choice for developing network services, such as web servers, proxies, and load balancers.

  5. Data processing: Rust’s performance and memory safety features make it well-suited for developing data processing and analytics applications, such as data pipelines and machine learning frameworks.

  6. Embedded systems: Rust’s low-level control, memory safety, and cross-platform support make it a good choice for developing software for embedded systems, such as microcontrollers and IoT devices.

Overall, Rust’s performance, safety, and versatility make it a good choice for developing a wide range of applications, particularly those that require high performance, concurrency, and memory safety.

Installing Rust 🦀

For Linux based systems, we can install Rust using the following command:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

This installs the rustup toolchain manager, which installs the latest stable version of Rust by default. The Cargo package manager is also installed by default. Installation for other operating systems can be found here.

We can update the rustup toolchain manager using the following command:

rustup update

Hello, World! from 🦀

As it is tradition, we will start with the Hello, World! program in Rust.

Before starting, we first need to create a new project using the following command:

cargo new hello_world

This creates a new project called hello_world in the current directory. The Cargo package manager is used to manage Rust projects. The Cargo.toml file contains the project metadata and dependencies. The src directory contains the source code for the project.

main.rs in src

The main.rs file in the src directory contains the source code for the hello_world project. The main function is the entry point for the program. The println! macro is used to print the Hello, World! string to the console.

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Compiling and running the program

We can compile the program using the following command:

cargo build

This compiles the program and generates the executable file in the target/debug directory. We can run the program using the following command:

cargo run

This compiles and runs the program. We can also run the program using the following command:

./target/debug/hello_world

Cargo 📦

Cargo is the Rust package manager and build tool. It is used to manage Rust projects and their dependencies. It is used to build, test, and run Rust programs. It is used to create new Rust projects and add dependencies to existing projects.

The Chapter 1 of Rust documentation can be found here.