Starting with Rust

Rust is a programming language developed at Mozilla Research and backed up by a big open source community. Its development was started in 2006 by language designer Graydon Hoare. Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009 and it was first presented officially in 2010. Work on this went through a lot of iterations, culminating in early 2015 in the first stable production, version 1.0.0, developed by the Rust Project Developers, consisting of the Rust team at Mozilla and an open source community of over 1800 contributors. Since then, Rust has developed in a steady pace; its current stable version is 1.20.0.

Rust is based on clear and solid principles. It is a systems programming language, equaling C and C++ in its capabilities. It rivals idiomatic C++ in speed, but it lets you work in a much safer way by forbidding code that could cause program crashes due to memory problems. Moreover, it makes concurrent programming and parallel execution on multi-core machines memory safe without garbage collection--it is the only language that does that. By design, Rust eliminates the corruption of shared data through concurrent access, called data races.

This chapter will present you with the main reasons why Rust's popularity and adoption are steadily increasing. Then, we'll set up a working Rust development environment.

We will cover the following:

• The advantages of Rust
• The trifecta of Rust--safe, fast and concurrent
• The stability of Rust and its evolution
• The success of Rust
• Using Rust
• Installing Rust
• The Rust compiler
• Our first program
• Working with Cargo
• Developer tools
• The Standard Library