Rust, the most loved language?

Rust has been declared the sixth year in a row as the most loved language by developers around the world according to the annual Stack Overflow survey.

Rust started as Mozilla engineer Graydon Hoare’s personal project in 2006. Hoare explained the reasons behind his work in 2012:

“A lot of obvious good ideas, known and loved in other languages, haven’t made it into widely used systems languages, or are deployed in languages that have very poor (unsafe, concurrency-hostile) memory models. There were a lot of good competitors in the late 70s and early 80s in that space, and I wanted to revive some of their ideas and give them another go, on the theory that circumstances have changed: the internet is highly concurrent and highly security-conscious, so the design-tradeoffs that always favor C and C++ (for example) have been shifting. “

During the last years, Rust has started to gain popularity, especially in áreas such as systems development, networking systems, embedded and web with a particular niche in the IoT industry. Rust has some noteworthy traits such as:

• Memory safety without garbage collection

• Does not allow dangling pointers or null pointers

• Lifetime concept to handle memory allocation, deallocation, and Access

• Compiler designed to catch subtle bugs

• Dependency manager

With these traits and more, Rust offers fast memory-efficient programs with a memory safety and thread safety ownership model that allows you to find bugs at compile-time.

In my case, I learned about Rust back in 2019 through a workmate that was fascinated with its capabilities and had been curious about it for years until life gave me a break and started learning Rust two weeks ago, and he was right. Even though I was taken out of my comfort zone, Rust is pretty great, the learning resources are great, the community is great, so I am looking forward to continuing the Rust roadmap and giving you an update in a later blog.