By Samuel Pauls.

Rust Basics

This article includes everything needed to get started developing Rust apps. It stops short of multi-threading and creating macros. It occasionally contrasts with C and C++.

History

Rust was created by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla to improve Firefox. He transferred the project to a core team. Now it’s evolved to several teams and a Request For Comment process. The core team now breaks tied votes. As of 2019, there are about 100 people in charge.

For five years from 2016 to 2021 inclusive, Rust has been voted the most loved programming language on the Stackoverflow developer survey!

Rust build support (the minimum) was merged into Linux at the end of 2022.

Priorities

Some features:

• No garbage collector and no need to deallocate memory.
• Minimal runtime and build tools, affording the programming maximum flexibility.
• Cargo package manager.
• Documentation standard and the rustdoc generation tool.
• Undefined behavior is impossible without the unsafe keyword.
• Restricted by default. For example, variables default to immutable and functions to private within their file.
• Prevents invalid data when using multiple threads.
• Native Unicode support.
• Supports Web Assembly.
• Statically typed with compiler inference.
• Guarantees thread safety.