Rust: A Modern Language for Safe and Fast General Purpose Programming

Rust is a relatively young language that has come of age in recent years. Its history dates back to 2006 at Mozilla, where Graydon Hoare began developing the programming language as a personal project. In 2009, Mozilla recognized Rust's potential and started supporting the project, leading to the release of Rust's stable version 1.0 in 2015. Mozilla also initiated the development of its browser engine, Servo, in Rust, which significantly impacted the developer community and helped the language attain its current status.

In 2020, Mozilla stepped back from Rust, and the Rust Foundation took over as the official maintainer of the language. The foundation collaborates with companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and others to continue developing Rust. This collaboration has been instrumental in propelling the language forward and expanding its adoption across various industries.

For those who keep up with developments in system programming, general-purpose programming languages, or even server and web development, Rust is a familiar name. It's often associated with terms like memory-safe, high-performance, and concurrent programming. Some even suggest that Rust represents the future, potentially supplanting languages like C and C++.

Why Rust Has Gained So Much Attention

Examining why Rust has garnered so much attention and popularity today reveals several key factors. Recent years have been particularly strong for the Rust community, marked by significant developments and endorsements from major tech companies. Microsoft has been exploring Rust to reduce memory safety issues in Windows components, announcing in 2021 that parts of the Windows operating system would be developed using Rust to enhance security and reliability. Similarly, Google has integrated Rust into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to improve security, aiming to eliminate entire classes of bugs related to memory safety by writing new components in Rust. AWS employs Rust in services like Firecracker, a virtualization technology that powers AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.

But why Rust, and why now? The explanation lies in the language's unique design, which addresses critical issues in software development, particularly around memory safety and concurrency. Traditional languages like C and C++ offer low-level memory management but leave room for errors such as buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, and data races. These issues can lead to security vulnerabilities and unstable software. Microsoft noted that nearly 70% of vulnerabilities over a 12-year period were due to memory safety issues. Rust tackles this problem directly with its ownership model and borrowing rules, which enforce memory safety at compile time. This means many potential bugs are caught before the code ever runs.

Rust achieves this level of safety without a garbage collector, which is common in languages like Java or C#. Instead, it uses a system called Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), ensuring that resources are properly allocated and deallocated. This approach provides memory safety and predictable performance, making Rust suitable for performance-critical applications.

Another significant development is DARPA's TRACTOR program (Translating All C to Rust), led by Dr. Dan Wallach. After more than two decades of grappling with memory safety issues in C and C++, the software engineering community has reached a consensus: it's not enough to rely solely on bug-finding tools. Instead, the preferred approach is to use “safe” programming languages like Rust that can reject unsafe programs at compile time, preventing memory safety issues altogether. TRACTOR aims to automate the translation of legacy C code to Rust, producing code with the same quality and style that a skilled Rust developer would create. The goal is to eliminate entire classes of memory safety vulnerabilities present in C programs. This program may involve novel combinations of software analysis, such as static and dynamic analysis, as well as machine learning techniques like large language models.

Furthermore, the significance of Rust in modern software development is also emphasized by a recent White House initiative. The Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface in cyberspace by adopting memory-safe programming languages like Rust. According to the report, entire classes of vulnerabilities can be prevented from entering the digital ecosystem through the use of memory-safe languages. ONCD is also encouraging the research community to address the problem of software measurability, developing better diagnostics that can measure the quality of cybersecurity in software systems.

These initiatives show that Rust is increasingly being viewed not only as a language for building safe and performant applications but also as a necessary tool for addressing broader security challenges across industries.

The Significance of Rust's Safety and Performance

One of Rust's standout features is its focus on safety without sacrificing performance. The ownership model prevents common memory errors by ensuring that each piece of data has a single owner, and the compiler checks references to data to prevent dangling pointers or data races. This model allows developers to write efficient code while avoiding many pitfalls associated with manual memory management.

Moreover, Rust compiles to native code and optimizes for speed, matching the performance of C and C++. It allows fine-grained control over memory layout and system resources, which is essential for systems programming. Writing concurrent code, which is notoriously difficult due to potential data races, is made safer in Rust. The language's type system and ownership model prevent data races at compile time, simplifying the development of concurrent applications.

A key aspect of Rust's appeal is its strong type system, which enforces strict compile-time checks to ensure type safety throughout the codebase. This means that mismatched types or unexpected data structures are caught early, reducing the likelihood of runtime errors. Rust’s type system also promotes clarity and correctness, ensuring that code is both reliable and maintainable, even as projects scale in complexity.

Rust also includes modern programming constructs like pattern matching, type inference, and powerful macros, enabling developers to write expressive and maintainable code. Its package manager, Cargo, simplifies dependency management and building, and the language comes with excellent documentation and a supportive community.

By combining safety, performance, and a robust type system, Rust gives developers the tools they need to build complex, high-performance applications with confidence in the code's reliability and security.

Community Adoption

As the community adopts Rust, many jokes and memes have emerged about the steep learning curve, frequent battles with the compiler, and similar experiences. However, the facts speak for themselves. Rust has been the most loved programming language for several years in the annual Stack Overflow survey, and it continues to climb steadily in the TIOBE index, now holding a solid position among the top 20 languages. A notable example of Rust’s influence is Deno, a significant rival to the long-standing Node.js JavaScript runtime, which was written in Rust. Similarly, Cloudflare’s project Pingora, designed to replace NginX, was also built using Rust. Amazon provides an official Rust SDK for AWS, and Microsoft has its own Rust-based tools to aid kernel development. Additionally, high-performance frameworks like Actix and Axum demonstrate Rust’s capabilities for server-side development.

The growing list of Rust-based projects extends beyond these examples. Rust is also gaining traction in database systems, embedded software development, and even Web3 and blockchain solutions. All signs point to Rust receiving even more attention in the near future. Whether in performance-critical environments or more general use cases, developers are increasingly turning to Rust for its versatility, safety, and growing ecosystem.

Rust in AI and Emerging Languages

Rust's role in AI development is steadily increasing. Huggingface, a prominent player in the AI field, is developing its own Rust-based AI framework called Candle-rs. This is just one of many Rust-based solutions in fields like AI, computer vision, and big data processing. Rust’s memory safety and performance make it an excellent choice for building AI frameworks that can handle large-scale computations and complex models efficiently.

One emerging trend influenced by Rust is the Mojo programming language. While Mojo adopts Python’s simple syntax, it borrows Rust’s memory management principles, allowing it to achieve performance levels that are orders of magnitude faster than Python. Rust’s influence in AI doesn’t stop there, as we can also look at Bend, a new programming language written in Rust, specifically designed for safe, multithreaded programming. Bend offers features similar to expressive languages like Python and Haskell, such as fast object allocations, full support for higher-order functions with closures, unrestricted recursion, and continuations.

What makes Bend stand out is its ability to scale like CUDA. It runs on massively parallel hardware, such as GPUs, and offers nearly linear acceleration based on core count, without the need for explicit parallelism annotations. This means developers don’t have to deal with the complexities of thread creation, locks, mutexes, or atomics. Bend is powered by the HVM2 runtime, making it a robust choice for high-performance parallel computing.

Rust’s growing presence in AI development, along with its influence on other emerging languages like Mojo and Bend, highlights its increasing importance in the future of both safe systems programming and performance-critical applications.

Conclusion

Here at Kadasolutions, we have been closely following Rust’s development for a long time and continuously adopt it in areas where memory safety, performance-critical environments, or simply making life easier for a frontend team with end-to-end type safety are important. Rust’s strong type system offers exactly that. For us, who work with Rust, this language is unlike any other. Beyond the countless advantages it brings, it doesn’t just improve the product—it pushes the developer to evolve and write better, more efficient code. In many ways, it teaches humility, as it challenges us to improve continuously.

We believe that by working with a language like Rust, we are investing in a future where our software will be better, faster, and more environmentally conscious. Rust offers us the tools to build not only robust applications but also a development culture that values quality and precision at every step.