This Programming Language Is Quickly Becoming One Of The Most Popular In The World

Computer programmers have never had it so good. There are thousands of programming languages to choose from, making it possible to create code that's elegant, efficient, and even formatted like a Shakespearean play, if you're so inclined. Despite this, professional coders typically rely on tried-and-tested languages like Python or C due to project limitations, their extensive documentation, and ease of maintenance. However, Rust is now one of the world's most-popular programming languages, and looks set to push out some of its older competitors.

Rust isn't just some upstart: It was created by a Mozilla employee named Grayden Hoare back in 2006, and has since acquired some very powerful backers. It's officially sponsored by Amazon Web Services, and Google now supports Rust libraries in both Chromium and Android. It's beloved by programmers themselves too, earning the title of Stack Overflow's "most admired programming language" for nine years running. So far, so good, but why are people flocking to Rust in such numbers?

At the time of Rust's inception, C and C++ were two of the go-to languages for professional coders. Unfortunately, they were also memory-unsafe, meaning the programmer had to account for potential memory issues ahead of time. Failing to do so could result in errors or unexpected behavior that is hard to reproduce, and even harder to fix. For example, trying to access the fifth item in a four-item array might crash the program or return data that shouldn't be accessible. That's a huge problem, especially if you're dealing with sensitive information, which is why both languages have made incremental improvements to memory safety since then.

Rust, on the other hand, was created from the ground up to be a memory-safe language. If you write code that could cause problems, it will simply fail to compile. For instance, Rust's borrow checker won't allow you to have immutable and mutable references at the same time unless you're using the "unsafe" keyword, which lets you bypass Rust's memory-safety rules. This immediately renders dangling pointers, buffer overflows, and use-after-free errors a non-issue. Better still, Rust automatically deallocates memory as soon as a value goes out of scope, so you don't even have to think about this side of things and can focus on the code itself.

Like C and C++, Rust is a highly-portable language, meaning its code can run on a huge variety of different systems. Unlike many of its predecessors, though, Rust has descriptive, useful error messages that actually tell you why something isn't working. This means novice programmers are more likely to understand the root cause of problems, and are less-reliant on community forums or AI-powered coding tools when things go wrong. Not only that, but Rust's guardrails force users to write memory-safe code, which is excellent preparation for learning languages like C or C++ later.

One of the reasons C and C++ are still so widely used is that they're extremely fast, but get this: Rust offers roughly the same level of performance. That's huge considering it's also newer, safer, and more beginner-friendly than its competitors. The difference is even more stark if your preferred language is Python, with Rust estimated to be between 10 and 100 times faster.

In other words, there's finally a widely-used alternative to legacy languages that doesn't compromise on speed. Rust is more popular than it's ever been, but it still has a long way to go if it wants to unseat C, Java, C++, or Python. That said, its rapid adoption could mean a seismic shift in the software-development industry is coming sooner than expected.