The fundamental benefits of programming in Rust

With native capabilities that span macros, generics, pattern matching and composition, the Rust programming language offers key features that make it a systems language to watch.

Programming in Rust offers speed and safety for various tasks, such as developing web apps, building distributed services or creating cross-platform applications that employ powerful command-line tools. The Rust language's major traits include a rich-type system in addition to functional-style features like closures and iterators. Developers can also cross-compile Rust to integrate with preexisting code, and the language is well-suited for low-resource environments.

In this article, we examine the various features of Rust that continue to attract an increasing number of developers looking for a dependable and composable cross-platform language.

Memory safety, compiler and library features

Memory safety is essential for distributed systems to perform efficiently. Rust enforces strict safe memory allocations, secure coding and concurrency support.

Rust requires ownership-based resource management through resource acquisition is initialization -- a fundamental object-oriented and C++ programming concept -- and smart pointers that reinforce safe memory usage. The Rust compiler is also more stringent than C-based languages, ensuring that memory-related problems never make it into production.

In Rust programming, each value is assigned an owner. Once an owner goes out of scope, the value is dropped. This feature controls memory tracking and allocation, and the compiler governs ownership distribution between objects to mitigate any surprises at runtime. By providing type-level guarantees for value-sharing, threads can borrow values, assume ownership and transition the scope of a value to a new thread.

In general, Rust's success rests upon its libraries, tooling and community support. However, that success also stems from its open compiler and language development process. Cargo, a community-built package manager for Rust libraries, provides numerous API bindings to common libraries and frameworks. Cargo's library is extensive, but keep in mind that third-party libraries -- known as crates -- require preliminary testing to determine a project's validity.

In addition, the Rust Standard Library provides well-known data structures that handle sequences, maps and other miscellaneous sets. The library also facilitates container deployments, string manipulations, thread management and I/O execution for networks and files.