Why Rust?

• Technical features
• Corporate Support / Acceptance
• Community Support / Acceptance

Technical features

• Rust Programming Language

• Performance
• Reliability
• Productivity

Performance

• Runtime speed is similar to C/C++.
• Memory efficient.
• No runtime.
• No garbage collector.
• Speed comparison of programming languages.
• Benchmark, speed of programming languages
• Size of integer in Python.
• Energy efficiency of programming languages.
• Zero-cost Abstractions: High-level features without runtime overhead.

Reliability

• Memory safe - it avoids most of the memory-related bugs we encounter in C/C++ code.
• Extensive and expressive type-system. (e.g. mapping of external APIs).
• Very strict compiler - fixing bugs during compilation.
• No "null" or "none" values.
• Compiler has very good error messages.
• Integrated package manager, build system, etc. Cargo.
• Code formatter rustfmt.
• Clippy, the linter
• IDE support by rust-analyzer.

Productivity

• Productivity - on par with Go, 2x as C++ at Google
• Spend less time writing tests.
• Spend less time debugging.
• Safer to use AI generated code (because the compiler will catch a lot of issues).
• Easy to write and distribute(!) cross-platform code for Windows, Linux, macOS. Especially small command-line tools.
• Fearless concurrency.

Corporate Support / Acceptance

• Rust Foundation Amazon, Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft.

• Many other corporations support and use Rust.

• Adoption in Critical Projects: Amazon's Firecracker and Dropbox's use of Rust for performance-critical tasks.

Podcasts

• Rust in Production podcast by Matthias Endler
• Rust at Work podcast by Gabor Szabo (shared on Rustacean Station)

Community Support / Acceptance

• Learning resurces: Documentation, Rust Book, Rustlings, Rust ebooks.
• Crates - large ecosystem of 3rd party libraries. See the growth
• More than 130 user groups and several conferences.
• Growing popularity (PYPL, Languish, TIOBE).
• Most admired / loved language for several years 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
• Linus Torvalds admitted Rust into the Linux kernel. See also the Rust for Linux project.
• Oxidising Ubuntu - coreutils, etc.

Crates (Libraries)

• Rayon a data-parallelism library. (threads)
• Tokio to build reliable network applications. (async)
• Web frameworks
  • Axum
  • Rocket
• Tauri - Cross-Platform desktop applications with web technologies.
• Bevy - A game engine.
• Ratatui - A Rust crate for cooking up Terminal User Interfaces.

Command line tools

• mdbook - to create books like this.

Drawbacks

• The ecosystem is less mature than for other languages.
• Not enough developers.
• Some aspects of the language still lag behind other languages (eg. Async in Go is easier).
• For embedded systems - not all hardware are supported. Yet. Platform support
• Compile time.

Python Projects in Rust

• ruff - a linter for Python.
• uv - a Python package installer (replacement for pip, poetry, pdm).
• polars - DataFrames (replacement for pandas).
• Pydentic, the data validation library for Python.

uv

uv, an extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.

Ruff

ruff, an extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.

JavaScript Projects in Rust

• Awesome JS tooling in Rust

• Deno JavaScript runtime.

• swc (Speedy Web Compiler) SWC can be used for both compilation and bundling.

• Volta JavaScript Tool Manager.

Thank you Ferris