Introduction
The Rust programming language helps write faster, more reliable software. High-level ergonomics and low-level control are often at odds in programming language design; Rust challenges that conflict. Through balancing powerful technical capacity and a great developer experience, Rust gives you the option to control low-level details (such as memory usage) without all the hassle traditionally associated with such control.
The adoption of Rust programming language by the developers has been increasing in an exponential manner. This language provides the simplicity and security which a developer needs while writing codes. According to the Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey, Rust surpassed the ever-popular Python and secured the top position as the most-loved language by the developers.
Why RUST?
Rust is proving to be a productive tool for collaborating among large teams of developers with varying levels of systems programming knowledge. Low-level code is prone to a variety of subtle bugs, which in most other languages can be caught only through extensive testing and careful code review by experienced developers. In Rust, the compiler plays a gatekeeper role by refusing to compile code with these elusive bugs, including concurrency bugs. By working alongside the compiler, the team can spend their time focusing on the program’s logic rather than chasing down bugs.
Rust also brings contemporary developer tools to the systems programming world:
- Cargo, the included dependency manager and build tool, makes adding, compiling, and managing dependencies painless and consistent across the Rust ecosystem.
- Rustfmt ensures a consistent coding style across developers.
- The Rust Language Server powers Integrated Development Environment (IDE) integration for code completion and inline error messages.
By using these and other tools in the Rust ecosystem, developers can be productive while writing systems-level code.
Hundreds of companies, large and small, use Rust in production for a variety of tasks. Those tasks include command line tools, web services, DevOps tooling, embedded devices, audio and video analysis and transcoding, cryptocurrencies, bioinformatics, search engines, Internet of Things applications, machine learning, and even major parts of the Firefox web browser.
A Case Study
Microsoft has been facing issues with C and C++ for a while now. In fact, Microsoft spends an estimate of $150,000 per issue as a whole to solve the issues and vulnerabilities. In 2018, there were more than 450 issues faced by the tech giant and it is only getting worse with time. This year, the tech giant faced over 470 issues.
To overcome such issues, Microsoft developers recently announced to use the Rust programming language instead of C and C++ to write and code the components of Windows. The project is known as Verona where the developers will develop a new and safer programming language for Windows.
Why Adopt Rust?
According to the developers at Microsoft Research, using C and C++ for developing software is a billion-dollar problem. C and C++ are one of the oldest programming languages, these languages lack the documentation for resources for modern machines. However, they work great on the low-level systems and it is mainly underlying based on the insecure technologies on which the developers create machines in the present scenario. One thing that really concerns the developers is safety while coding. C and C++ lack this ability to write secure and correct code.
Some of the reasons which led to the adoption of Rust are mentioned below:
- The memory and data safety guarantees made by the Rust compiler is stronger than that of C and C++.
- Less time is spent debugging trivial issues or frustrating race conditions in Rust.
- The compiler warning and error messages are extremely well written in Rust than in C and C++.
- The documentation of Rust for compiling error messages and other such topics are provided neatly than the documentation of C and C++.
As Rust is relatively younger than C, the developers at Microsoft Research mentioned that there are several important features which are missing in this new language in order to make it fully developed:
- Safe Transmutation: Safe transmutation helps to safely cast “plain old data” types to and from raw bytes.
- Safe Support for C Style Unions and Fallible Allocation.
Wrapping Up
Previously, there are a few programming languages which have been created at the Microsoft Research, like:
- F* – a functional programming language inspired by ML and aimed at program verification, where ML is a general-purpose functional programming language
- Cω or Comega – a free extension to the C# programming language
- Spec Sharp – a programming language with specification language features that extends the capabilities of the C# programming language
Rust, the multi-paradigm system programming language has been appreciated by the developers for a few years now. This year, Rust language has secured the second position as the fastest-growing programming language contributed by the GitHub repository contributors.
Developers at Microsoft Research seem to be adopting this language to have a more secure environment for coding. It ensures as a memory-safe programming language and has a few interesting features like unit testing built into Cargo which allows developers to write unit tests in the same file as production code and run them easily while developing. However, this is not the first time that the tech giant research centre is creating a new language.
Click here to watch the Rust-Adoption video.
- Raghav, Solution Architect
Friedtip 