When to Choose Rust • Tim McNamara • YOW! 2022

Learn when to choose Rust, a language designed for systems programming with a strong focus on memory safety, performance, and concurrency, featuring a unique ownership model and powerful borrow checker.

Key takeaways
  • Rust’s ownership model is that every variable has one place in which it is the owner of the data.
  • Rust is designed with systems programming in mind and has strong focus on memory safety and performance.
  • The language is known for being relatively concise and expressive, with a syntax that is often described as “niche” or “quirky” to developers who are used to other languages.
  • The Rust community is known for being vibrant and inclusive, with a strong emphasis on documentation and community support.
  • One of the key benefits of Rust is that it enables developers to write code that is safer and more reliable, with fewer runtime errors.
  • Rust’s borrow checker helps ensure that data is not mutated while it is being used, which helps to eliminate common errors such as null pointer dereferences.
  • Rust’s memory layout is designed to be predictable and cache-friendly, which can help to improve performance.
  • The language is designed to be suitable for a wide range of use cases, from systems programming to high-performance computing.
  • Rust’s garbage collection is relatively rare, as it only happens when a variable is no longer referenced anywhere in the program.
  • The language’s focus on memory safety can lead to more explicit and manual memory management, which can be beneficial for systems programming but may be less familiar to developers who are used to languages with automatic garbage collection.
  • Rust’s type system is designed to be expressive and flexible, with features such as trait-based polymorphism and generic programming.
  • The language is designed to be compatible with other programming languages, including C, C++, and Java.
  • Rust’s borrow checker can be a source of frustration for developers who are used to languages with automatic garbage collection, but it can also be a powerful tool for ensuring memory safety.