Rust: A language for the next 40 years

This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.

I have no affiliation whatsoever with anyone in this note. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)

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Why is it important: Gives an overview of what Rust is good at, which will allow me to assess whether or not to learn it

Rust, Programming

Not an unbiased talk, but talks about the strengths of rust

Rust is as safe as a language gets. In an age where cybersecurity becomes an increasing concern, Rust’s default safe approach will be adopted more

C has a LOT of memory safety problems. Because a lot of other languages use C under the hood, they have these problems too. Some of these includes:

Rust is trying to learn from the mistakes of C. There are a bunch of reasons why it can last as long as C:

Makes systems programming easier. Rust allows makes debugging really easy and gives you memory safety by default. Trade offs: - Rust has the order of Cs performance at runtime (though compiling takes longer because of all the check) - It also compiles to everything that LLVM can. Though C can compile to non LLVM platforms too - BUT rust is far more complex than C. Has a lot more features and syntax. Has a very steep learning curve - It’s super easy to call Rust from Python or Ruby

Stability without stagnation - Rust has strong backward compatibilities. Upgrading generally breaks your code - You can keep upgrading your compiler every 6 weeks, or you can just never upgrade it. It’s totally up to you

Large enterprises are using Rust - Mozilla. Firefox Quantum was 2x faster on the speedometer 2.0 benchmark because of a component (CSS Rendering) that was re-written in Rust - There were 69 security bugs in this component since Firefox started. Rust would’ve prevented 51 of them - Amazon. Firecracker microVM is on Rust - Google. Fuchsia uses Rust - Facebook. Mononoke uses Rust - Microsoft uses rust for IoT edge stuff

Rust Governance - No BDFL. Have teams and working groups - Consist of language theorists, enterprise users, hobby users, Low-level language people, functional languages, and high-level language people - All decisions are made in public via Requests for Comments