Rise of Rust
Rust programming language is a relatively new language gaining popularity in recent years. The language is so popular that many developers are switching towards Rust for specific coding. It is a statistically typed language developed by Graydon Hoare that first appeared in 2010. Being a fairly new language, Rust has many limitations but yet the sudden rise in the number of developers using the language says a lot about the advantages this language may have over others. Recent stats on the popularity of the language are-
- In a survey by stack overflow, 86% of the developers said they’ll continue using the language in the future.
- In TIOBE’s index, Rust comes in the top 20 languages.
- Rust was voted as the most loved language from 2016 to the year 2020 in stack overflow surveys.
Rust language was designed keeping safety in mind and by far, it provides better memory safety than most programming languages including mature languages.
Misuse or wrong use of memory is the most common reason for the security risk in programming and Rust overcomes that very well.
To ensure memory safety and functionality, it provides two modes for writing the code, safe mode, and unsafe mode. In the safe mode, additional restrictions are applied to ensure both type safety and memory safety that avoids issues like dangling pointer or use-after-free. While in the case of unsafe Rust, it lets you perform some low-abstraction coding which isn’t possible in safe Rust mode. It becomes handy when you need to call your code in other languages or want to perform any coding which can be unsafe. To use the unsafe mode, the developer has to put extra effort into data abstraction and another memory usage to remove the security risk.
Being a statically typed language, it also removes runtime errors by checking the variable type at compile time. It needs more time to compile the code but saves the time of bugfix by showing clear suggestion to handle bugs.
In Rust, the developers can choose to store the data in a memory heap or stack and can decide at compile time about the need of losing data to free-up memory. The language does not use any garbage collector and hence can be used to create libraries for other programming languages to be used through a foreign-language interface. Developers can also omit the tricky codes from their programs and use Rust codes as a library to increase performance.
Rust offers a dedicated server that provides 100% uptime. The language is prominently used for bugfix and error handling for Linux or iOS. The compiler of Rust is very efficient and suggests solutions for errors.
For memory management, Rust uses a borrow checker which checks the use of memory. The borrow checker inspects the need of dropping the memory like a garbage collector with the efficiency of manual memory management. The program doesn’t need to stop to find when the memory should be dropped. The borrow checker also avoids the memory bugs by ensuring the references of the memory do not outlive the area they refer to.
The memory abstraction in Rust allows the language to be directly connected to the hardware memory making it suitable for the embedded or bare-metal development.
As Rust is a new language that is still maturing, it does not provide many libraries and toolkits. All the functions and modules of the language are included in cargo which manages dependencies, runs, tests, and generates documentation. It can also be used to install and use available toolkits.
Although, Rust is becoming very popular day by day and developers cannot stop talking about that, there are a few drawbacks this programming language has. These drawbacks are
- In Rust, all the errors are shown at compile time. It can be overwhelming for those who do not have the habit to resolve all the coding errors at once.
- Being a new language, Rust lacks a lot of important libraries and many tools which increases the efforts in coding for complex operations.
- The compiler is built on LLVM hence the platforms it covers are much less than objective C or C++.
- Take longer compiler time.
Rust vs C++
In comparison to C++, Rust has better security in safe mode but also provides the independency of using memory in unsafe mode. It is easy to approach for experienced developers and easy to learn for new programmers. But C++ is easy to compile and has an extensive number of libraries to work on. For now, C++ is better in complex coding. You can call C++ code to Rust and Rust code to C++ thanks to the CXX library and AutoCXX library.
Rust vs Java
Rust is way faster than Java giving faster startups and has other advantages in performance and security. Even when Java is a highly mature language that is used in most web developments, Rust is far more secure than Java. According to Microsoft Security Response Center nearly 70%of the vulnerabilities caused in their system are due to their memory-safety issues. Using Rust, these vulnerabilities can be omitted as it won’t compile a code that attempts unsafe memory usage.
Rust vs Python
Python nowadays is the most used language and Rust gives a tough competition to the language too. Rust is almost twice as fast as Python. It manages memory in heap and stacks instead of a garbage tool that significantly reduces the execution time of the code. It also gives recommendations to fix errors at compile time. While Python is a beginner-friendly language with easier documentation. Being a widely used and supported language, it has tons of tools and libraries available with a highly active community to work on complex codes. In Python, developers are responsible for memory management while in Rust, memory management is not an issue due to the safe mode of the language. Again, Rust is highly secure than Python too.
Rust Vs Go
Rust and Go both are new system programming languages offering modern solutions and exclusive performance. Rust is built to keep security at priority, while priority was given to speed and performance while Go. In Go, developers drive for clean codes to reduce detected compile time without giving much thought to runtime. It uses a garbage collector so the program can be unpredictable at runtime.
Rust vs Ada
Both the languages are fairly new and are mainly used to fix bugs of other languages. The Rust somehow proves to be better in security. Ada does provide the same security level by using dangling pointers and corrupt memory, but in rust, no additional effort is needed for the same. It becomes easier to handle memory safety in Rust. While Rust extends its ideas from languages like C++, Ada follows the methods of Pascal for data security.
Final Saying!
The success of any programming language widely depends on its community. The community of Rust is highly active and hence it can be safely said, Rust can rise to become a popular language in near future. The community has also made Rust programming language tutorials available on different platforms to spread the knowledge.
