What is Rust? The Programming Language Explained

Rust is a systems programming language designed for speed, reliability and memory safety. It compiles to fast native machine code like C and C++, but its compiler prevents whole classes of bugs, such as dangling pointers, buffer overflows and data races, before the program ever runs. Rust started at Mozilla, reached version 1.0 in 2015 and is now stewarded by the independent Rust Foundation.

What makes Rust different?

• Memory safety without a garbage collector: the ownership and borrowing rules let the compiler decide when memory is freed. No garbage collector pauses, no manual memory management.
• Fearless concurrency: code that could cause a data race between threads doesn't compile, which makes multi-threaded and async software far easier to get right.
• Performance: zero-cost abstractions mean high-level code compiles to the same machine code you would write by hand.
• Explicit error handling: no null and no unchecked exceptions; Option and Result force every failure case to be handled.
• Modern tooling: Cargo handles builds, dependencies, tests and documentation, with tens of thousands of libraries (crates) on crates.io.

What is Rust used for?

Rust is used wherever speed and reliability both matter: web servers and APIs, trading and data-processing systems, command-line tools, embedded devices, WebAssembly in the browser, and blockchain programs (Solana smart contracts are written in Rust). Large organisations have adopted it in critical software: Rust code runs in the Linux kernel, Android, Windows, and the infrastructure of AWS and Cloudflare. This website itself runs on a content management system we built in Rust.

Advantages and trade-offs

Advantages: very fast, predictable latency, low memory and server costs, and far fewer crashes and security bugs in production. Once Rust code compiles, it tends to keep working.

Trade-offs: Rust has a steeper learning curve than Python, Go or C#, compile times are longer, and the pool of experienced developers is smaller. For a simple internal tool or a quick prototype, another language is often the more practical choice.

When is Rust the right choice?

Rust pays off for software that has to be fast, run for a long time without supervision, or handle money and sensitive data: high-throughput APIs, real-time data pipelines, trading engines and performance-critical parts of existing systems. Rewriting an existing application in Rust is a bigger decision; we wrote about it in when does a Rust rewrite pay off. See also our Rust development services and WebAssembly.

Frequently Asked Questions about Rust