Rust: A system programming language

Multi-paradigm: concurrent, functional, generic, imperative, structured

In this article, I have shared essential information about Rust programming language where you will find all the related information that helps to kick-start with Rust.

Rust programming language continuously climbing the ladder and entered the top 20 list in 2020, of the Tiobe popularity index for the first time, but it’s still five spots behind systems programming rival Go.

Rust has seen its ranking rise considerably on Tiobe, from 38 last year to 20 today. Tiobe’s index is based on searches for a language on major search engines, so it doesn’t mean more people are using Rust, but it shows that more developers are searching for information about the language.

Rust was voted for the fifth year straight the most-loved programming language by developers in Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey. This year, 86% of developers said they are keen to use Rust, but just 5% actually use it for programming.

Image source- www.tiobe.com

On the other hand, it could become more widely used thanks to Microsoft’s public preview of its Rust library for the Windows Runtime (WinRT), which makes it easier for developers to write Windows, cross-platform apps and drivers in Rust.

Overview

Rust programming language is designed to provide better memory safety, but it is still under the maintenance process. Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language focused on performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++ and provides memory safety without using garbage collection.

Rust is free and open-source software, i.e., anyone can use the software freely, and the source code is openly shared so that the people can also improve the design of the software.

There is no direct memory management like calloc or malloc. It means the memory is managed internally by Rust.

Brief History

Rust is a system programming language developed by a Mozilla employee “Graydon Hoare” in 2006. He described this language as a “safe, concurrent and practical language” that supports the functional and imperative paradigm.

• The first numbered pre-alpha release of the Rust compiler occurred in January 2012.
• Rust 1.0, the first stable release, was released on May 15, 2015
• Rust 1.45.0, stable release, was released on Jul 16, 2020.
• Rust 1.45.2 (current version), stable release, was released on Aug 3, 2020.
• Rust 1.46.0, (upcoming version), expected to release on Aug 27, 2020.

Features

1. Type inference

Rust determines the type of an expression automatically.

2. Abstraction

We can add abstractions without affecting the runtime performance of the code. It improves the code quality and readability of the code without any runtime performance cost.

3. Error messages

In C++ programming, there is an excellent improvement in error messages as compared to GCC. Rust goes one step further in case of clarity. Error messages are displayed with (formatting, colours) and also suggest misspellings in our program.

4. Move semantics

Rust provides this feature that allows a copy operation to be replaced by the move operation when a source object is a temporary object.

5. Threads without data races

A data race is a condition when two or more threads are accessing the same memory location. Rust provides the feature of threads without data races because of the ownership system. Ownership system transmits only the owners of different objects to different threads, and two threads can never own the same variable with write access.

6. Pattern matching

Rust provides the feature of pattern matching. In pattern matching, patterns in Rust are used in conjunction with the ‘match’ expressions to give more control over the program’s control flow. Following are the combinations of some patterns:

· Literals

· Arrays, enums, structs, or tuples

· Variables

· Wildcards

· Placeholders

7. Guaranteed memory safety

Rust guaranteed memory safety by using the concept of ownership. Ownership is a middle ground between the memory control of C and the garbage collection of Java. In Rust programs, memory space is owned by the variables and temporarily borrowed by the other variables. This allows Rust to provide memory safety at the compile-time without relying on the garbage collector.

8. Efficient C bindings

Rust provides the feature of ‘Efficient C bindings’ means that the Rust language can be able to interoperate with the C language as it talks to itself. Rust provides a ‘foreign function interface’ to communicate with C API’s and leverage its own system to guarantee memory safety at the same time.

9. Safe memory space allocation

In Rust, memory management is manual, i.e., the programmer has explicit control over where and when memory is allocated and deallocated. In C language, we allocate the memory using malloc function and then initialize it but Rust refuses these two operations by a single ‘~’ operator. This operator returns the smart pointer to int. A smart pointer is a special kind of value that controls when the object is freed. Smart pointers are “smart” because they not only track where the object is but also know how to clean it up.

Applications

Rust is a system programming language and it can be used in:

1. Web browser components

2. Operating System components

3. Cloud services

4. News outlets

5. Media platforms

6. On-demand services