Rust
Noun · Development · Origin: 2010
Definitions
Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency, developed by Mozilla Research and first released in 2015. Its defining feature is the borrow checker, a compile-time system that enforces strict rules about memory ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, eliminating entire classes of bugs such as null pointer dereferences, data races, buffer overflows, and use-after-free errors without requiring a garbage collector. Rust achieves performance comparable to C and C++ while providing memory safety guarantees that those languages cannot. The language supports zero-cost abstractions, pattern matching, algebraic data types (enums), traits (similar to interfaces), and powerful macro systems. Rust's package manager and build tool, Cargo, along with the crates.io registry, provide a modern development experience. Rust is used for operating systems, game engines, web browsers (parts of Firefox), command-line tools, WebAssembly modules, embedded systems, and cloud infrastructure. It has been voted the 'most loved' programming language in Stack Overflow surveys for multiple consecutive years.
In plain English: A programming language designed to be as fast as C but much safer, preventing the memory bugs that cause most security vulnerabilities in traditional systems software.
Etymology
- 2006
- Graydon Hoare begins Rust as a personal project at Mozilla, named after the rust fungi known for being robust and distributed
- 2015
- Rust 1.0 releases, promising memory safety without garbage collection — a combination previously thought impossible
- 2023
- Rust is adopted into the Linux kernel, the first language besides C and Assembly to be used there in 30+ years
Origin Story
Named after a fungus, built for safety
Graydon Hoare started Rust as a personal project in 2006 while working at Mozilla. The language was named after the rust fungi — organisms that are 'over-engineered for survival,' which Hoare saw as an apt metaphor for robust systems programming.
Mozilla sponsored Rust officially starting in 2009, seeing it as a path to building a safer web browser engine. The Servo project (an experimental browser engine in Rust) served as Rust's proving ground. The first stable release, Rust 1.0, shipped in May 2015.
Rust's ownership and borrowing system — which prevents data races and memory errors at compile time without a garbage collector — was initially seen as too restrictive. But as developers experienced the 'if it compiles, it works' reliability, Rust became the most-loved programming language in Stack Overflow's developer survey for seven consecutive years.
Coined by: Graydon Hoare
Context: Personal project, 2006; Mozilla-sponsored from 2009
Fun fact: Rust has won Stack Overflow's 'Most Loved Language' award every year it has been eligible, an unprecedented streak.