Introduction

Rust is a statically-typed general-purpose programming language, known for its emphasis on performance, type safety, concurrency, and memory safety. It supports multiple programming paradigms - Functional, Object-oriented (OOP), Concurrent, Generic, Imperative, Structured.

Rust was created in 2006 by a software developer Graydon Hoare while working at Mozilla, which officially sponsored the project in 2009. The first stable release, Rust 1.0, was published in May 2015. Following a layoff of Mozilla employees in August 2020, four other companies joined Mozilla in sponsoring Rust through the creation of the Rust Foundation in February 2021.

NOTE

Rust Developers often refer to themselves as Rustaceans (pronounced 'rus-TAY-shun').

Features

NOTE

A data race occurs when two or more threads access the same memory at the same time, and at least one modifies it without proper synchronization, causing unpredictable behavior.

Memory Safety without Garbage Collection

Rust guarantees memory safety at compile time through its ownership and borrowing system. You’ll explore these concepts in more detail later, but for now, it’s enough to know that they enable C/C++-level performance while preventing common issues like null pointer dereferences and data races.

Zero-Cost Abstractions

“Zero-cost abstractions” in Rust means you can write clean, easy-to-read code using features like loops, iterators, or pattern matching without slowing your program down. The Rust compiler is smart enough to turn these high-level commands into super-efficient machine code, so your program runs just as fast as if you’d written all the low-level details by hand. In other words, you get simplicity and speed, with no trade-off.

In other languages like Python or Java, high-level features such as loops or iterators can make programs slower because they add extra layers of work at runtime, such as memory checks or interpreter overhead.

Concurrency Made Safe

Rust’s type system prevents data races at compile time, making it much safer to write multithreaded programs.

Compiled Language

Rust compiles to native machine code using LLVM, similar to C and C++, making it suitable for system-level and performance-critical software.