You see rust on old cars, buildings and tools. It’s the result of a natural process between iron and oxygen in water or air moisture. The reaction produces iron oxide or rust, usually red or black in color. It also has a rough texture. We all know that rust is a sign of aging but did you know it can be used for survival purposes?
Rust is a programming language that creates fast, system-level software. The goal of the language’s creators is for programs to run on a variety of platforms and architectures without the need for complicated cross-compilation. The language’s syntax and idioms are designed for high performance. In addition, it has strong safety features that ensure memory errors such as null or dangling pointers and data races never make it into production code.
Those are just some of the reasons many well-known software heavyweights now use Rust, including Mozilla, Dropbox and Cloudflare. Others, such as Figma and 1Password, have taken advantage of its powerful mutability and concurrency support.
But while Rust’s performance and safety are impressive, there is no getting around its learning curve. For example, it can be difficult to grok the language’s metaphors for ownership and borrowing, which often trip newbie programmers up. In addition, a rigorous borrow checker and a strict separation between mutable and immutable objects mean that code in Rust can look more verbose than some other languages. Despite these challenges, there are numerous resources to help you get up to speed with the programming language.
