Oct 4, 20214 min read

Rust Programming Language

Rust is a multi-paradigm, high-level, general-purpose programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references. Rust achieves memory safety without garbage collection, and reference counting is optional.

The Rust programming language allows the developer to write faster, more reliable software. High-level comfort design and low-level control are often at odds in programming language design; Rust objects that competition.

Rust programming language is used for game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components and simulation engines for virtual reality.

History:

Rust was originally designed by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla Research, with contributions from Dave Herman, Brendan Eich, and others. The designers refined the language while writing the Servo experimental browser engine, and the Rust compiler. It has gained increasing use in industry, and Microsoft has been experimenting with the language for secure and safety-critical software components.

Rust has been voted the "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey every year since 2016, though only used by 7% of the respondents in the 2021 survey.

Syntax:

Rust files always end with the .rs extension. If you’re using more than one word in your filename, use an underscore to separate them. For example, use hello_world.rs rather than helloworld.rs.

fn main() {     
    println!("Hello, world!"); 
}

Installation:

Step 1: Downloading The Software

To download the software, you have to visit the official website of Rust https://www.rust-lang.org/ and navigate to the install option.

After clicking the install button, you should see the RUSTUP.INIT.exe file on the next page.

Click on the file highlighted in the image and get the software downloaded into the system. It will take a maximum of 2 minutes.

Step 2: Installing the software

To install the software, just open the software and click it, and you must see the below window popping up.

After hitting run, the below window with the command prompt open up.

After selecting option 1 and hitting enter, the following window appears- Rust is installed now!

Now we can close the command prompt and go to the .cargo folder to see our installed files and packages.

Step 3: Creating a new package.

To create a new package, we open our command prompt and type:

cargo new file_name

Step 4: Running the first program

As we created the package called my_first_rust_program, inside it, a folder called src has been created and a default program file called main.rs is created, which contains our first hello-world! program of Rust. To do this, change the directory to src folder in the command prompt.

Now, to run the main.rs inside the src folder, we first need to compile the file and then run the file. To compile, we have to use the keyword rustc and then the program file name.

rustc main.rs

After the compilation, an executable file called main.exe is created inside the same folder. So, to execute that, we type: main and hit enter.

main

Why Rust?

Performance

Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages.

Reliability

Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — enabling you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.

Productivity

Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more.

Features:

Rust id intended to be a language for highly concurrent and highly safe systems and programming in large; creating and maintaining boundaries that preserve large-system integrity.

Below are the features of Rust:

Memory safety: Rust is designed to be memory safe. It does not permit null pointer, dangling pointer or data races. Data values can be initialized only through a fixed set of forms, all of which require their inputs to be already initialized.
Memory Management: Rust does not use automated garbage collection. Memory and other resources are managed through the resource acquisition is initialization convention, with optional reference counting. Rust provides deterministic management of resources, with very low overhead. Rust favors stack allocation of values and does not perform implicit boxing.
Ownership: Rust has an ownership system where all values have a unique owner, and the scope of the value is the same as the scope of the owner. Values can be passed by immutable reference, using &T, by mutable reference, using &mut T, or by value, using T.
Types and Polymorphism: The type system supports a mechanism similar to type classes, called traits, inspired by the Haskell language. This facility is for ad hoc polymorphism, achieved by adding constraints to type variable declarations.

Advantages:

Rust can work on different platforms and also can be used as a functional, statically typed and system programing language.
Rust is more secure than the language from which it has been inherited. Such as C or C++. Rust focuses more on consistency and better memory safety.
Rust requires only the operating systems and no additional software is required for compiling Rust programs.
Rust codes are reusable. This is done through modules which are accessible by other modules.
Rust supports a complex collection of data types.
Rust is very good at error handling.
Rust is a well-designed programming language.
Rust inherits its properties from different programming languages such as C++, C, Haskell, cyclone, ML and OCaml, and thus Rust has all properties of functional programming, statically typed language as well as system programming languages.

Disadvantages:

Learning Rust may not be that simpler, and also requires a good knowledge about C++ or any object-oriented language.
Since Rust is a system programming languages also, therefore performing simple kinds of tasks also may take lots of understanding and uses of different syntaxes.
In Rust, the codes cannot be developed as fast as can be developed in other scripting languages like Python or Perl.
There is no garbage collection in Rust.
The Compiler of Rust is very slow compared to the other typical programming language compiler.
The binary files which are created in Rust are much larger but the codes are not efficient to that level.
In case of scripts which are more than a thousand lines, the compile time may be much higher, maybe around a minute or two.
Rust provides less aliasing information compared to C or C++.

what is the Difference Between C++ and Rust?

Rust	C++
The moved object cannot be used, as a static analyzer does not permit it	The move constructors are to leave the source object in a valid state.
The compiler can rely on static analyzer which does not permit the use of moved object, to optimize the code	In the C++, at the compile time, the use-after-move errors can be detected by the external static code analyzer.
The Raw pointers can be used inside unsafe blocks. These blocks can be automatically detected by tools.	Raw pointers can be spotted by manual code review.
In the case of buffer-overflow, range checks are forced by all slice types	Range checks are forced by the explicitly coded wrapper classes.
At the compile time, the detection and prohibition of data races are done by the built-in borrow checker and Rust reference model.	Data races or concurrency errors are taken care of by good programming practices and discipline, knowledge and careful review.
In the case of Object initialization, before used or checked by the compiler, all the variables must be explicitly initialized.	In C++, to initialize all object fields, its necessary to use user-defined constructors.

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