Rust — Why Is Everyone Talking About It? (Even Elon Musk)
This tweet recently caught my eye.
According to Elon Musk, AGI will be written in Rust rather than Python, the most popular programming language for building ML models in the current tech ecosystem.
What’s So Good About Rust?
Rust has been Stack Overflow’s most loved language for many years in a row.
Most developers using it really love it and more than 80% of developers that use it want to use it again next year.
Rust is also getting popular amongst new developers who aim to write safe/ stable and concurrent/ scalable applications.
Here are the 6 reasons that make Rust so awesome!
1. High Speed & Performance
Rust believes in the principle that you shouldn’t pay for what you don’t use.
It provides high-level abstractions that compile to efficient machine code as if you wrote the low-level code by hand as in C/ C++.
These high-level features have minimal to no runtime overhead.
If you don’t use a particular feature/ abstraction, your compiled code won’t carry the burden of its potential overhead.
2. Memory Safety Without A Garbage Collector
Many languages (like Java/ C#) ensure memory safety using a garbage collector.
A Garbage collector automatically frees up memory that is no longer in use by periodically checking which objects in memory are still accessible and which are not.
A big issue with garbage collectors is that they can cause unpredictable pauses in a program’s execution. This is problematic for real-time systems where predictable timing is crucial.
This is different to how Rust works.
Rust ensures memory safety without having a garbage collector. This is through its Ownership and Borrowing system.
This means there are no runtime garbage collection pauses.
Memory is managed predictably at compile-time, making it well-suited for real-time and performance-critical applications.
3. Use Of Advanced Well-Optimized Compiler
Rust uses LLVM as a core component on its backend.
LLVM is a powerful and modular collection of compiler technologies that optimizes Rust code making it fast and providing it the ability to run on a wide variety of CPU architectures.
4. Avoiding Data Races
Data Race is a condition where two or more threads can access the same memory location simultaneously.
This is an absolute disaster when one writes concurrent software applications.
Rust uses a combination of its type system, ownership model, and borrowing rules to ensure that multi-threaded Rust programs are free from data races.
5. Cargo Package Manager
Languages like C/ C++ lack a standard package manager.
This is unlike Rust, where Cargo serves as a combined build tool, package manager, test runner, and documentation generator.
This makes writing Rust applications using dependencies easy and streamlined.
6. Direct Access To Hardware
Rust allows developers to have direct access to hardware and memory.
This is crucial for systems programming and writing embedded applications.
Rust provides support for inline assembly and platform-specific crates (libraries) that offer interfaces to hardware.
Rust can also call C functions and can be called from C code using the Foreign Function Interface.
This is beneficial because many hardware interaction libraries are written in C.
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