Rust

Rust is a systems programming language focused on memory safety without a garbage collector, achieved through a compile-time ownership model. It produces native binaries with C-like performance and zero-cost abstractions, while preventing entire classes of bugs (use-after-free, data races) at the type level.

Core ideas

• Ownership and borrowing. Each value has one owner; references are tracked by the compiler to prevent aliasing bugs.
• No garbage collector. Memory is reclaimed deterministically when values go out of scope (Drop trait).
• Traits and generics. Zero-cost abstractions via monomorphisation; expressive type system.
• Fearless concurrency. The type system prevents data races; libraries (Tokio, Rayon) provide high-level concurrency.
• Cargo. First-class build tool, dependency manager, test runner, and documentation generator.

Where Rust is used

• Systems and infra: Firefox internals, Linux kernel modules, parts of Cloudflare, AWS Firecracker
• Web back-ends: Actix Web, Axum, Rocket, Loco
• Data engines: TiKV, ScyllaDB rewrites, Pingora, Vector, Materialize, Datafusion
• Tooling: ripgrep, fd, bat, deno, rustdoc, the new TypeScript compiler being written in Rust