Tadas Sasnauskas Tech/Engineering Blog

Learning something new: Rust programming language

New programming languages lately have been popping up almost monthly but one has really caught my eye: Rust. While everyone else is mostly doing new interpreted, garbage collected languages, Rust is quite a bit different. Key points of interest for me are:

  • Rust is compiled systems language allowing to go as low as C
  • Unique memory model – guaranteed memory safety
  • Non garbage collected but it kind of feels like one
  • Threading without data races
  • Supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles

It’s a modern language systems language which can potentially become a very strong competitor C and C++.

While I have no plans to write actual real world WEB applications in Rust, for me personally it looks like a very promising Internet of Things language. Speed and power of C for microcontrollers without headaches of memory management. Sure, microcontrollers nowadays are cheap and powerful but running Python on your light bulb simply does not make sense. And there’s already at least one project with aim to bring Rust into embedded environment: zinc.rs.