What is Rust?

Rust is a system programming language focusing mainly on safety, concurrency, and performance. Rust was developed by Mozilla Research and the initial version was released in 2010, then the first stable version was launched in 2015. The goal of designing Rust was to address the challenges of writing low-level code, such as memory optimization and code safety, data races, and undefined behavior, which were faced in languages like C and C++. Rust offers a noticeable safety, performance, and expressiveness which makes it an attractive choice for system programming, embedded development, and other domains where reliability and efficiency are.

Key Features of Rust

• Memory Safety: The most powerful feature of Rust is its ownership system, Rust enforces compile-time checks to prevent common memory-related errors such as null pointer, buffer overflows, and use-after-free bugs. Rust also ensures that memory is managed safely without the need of a garbage collector, by tracking the lifetimes of references.
• Powerful Concurrency Mechanism: Rust offers a powerful concurrency mechanism, such as lightweight threads (well known as “tasks” or “async/await” syntax) and the concept of ownership, which offers safe concurrent access to shared data. Rust language guarantees thread safety through its type system, which eliminates data races as well as other concurrency hazards at compile time.
• High Performance: Rust focuses mainly on safety and high-level abstractions, it delivers performance similar to that of C and C++. Its zero-cost abstractions and minimal runtime load make it well-suited for resource-constrained environments, such as high-performance applications and embedded systems.
• Expressive Syntax: Rust offers a modern and expressive syntax inspired by functional and imperative programming paradigms. Features such as pattern-matching capabilities, algebraic data types, and type inference mechanisms enable developers to write concise and easily readable code along with maintaining low-level control over the system resources.
• Rich Tools and Ecosystem: Rust has a rich ecosystem of libraries, tools, and package managers that streamline the development process. Rust’s official package manager Cargo, and build system help to simplify dependency management, project configuration, and code distribution, which promotes collaboration and reusing code within the Rust community.

Advantages of Rust

• Rust’s strict compile-time checks and ownership model remove entire classes of bugs commonly found in other systems programming languages, which found error compile-time and results in more reliable and secure software.
• Rust focuses on zero-cost abstractions and significant control over system resources which enables developers to accomplish high performance without sacrificing safety or productivity, and also makes it well-suited for applications where performance is critical.
• Rust also provides support for multiple platforms, which includes Windows, macOS, Linux, and various embedded systems, allowing developers to write portable code that can be deployed across different environments without modification.

In the large landscape of programming languages when it comes to selecting programming language for projects, developers have many options to select but they face difficulties in selecting the right language, Out of many options two strong contenders are very popular and widely used languages Ruby and Rust.

Both languages have powerful tools and features but they both have distinct characteristics. Today, in this article we will have an inside look at both languages with their top differences that will ease developers to select either of them.