Hanzla Baig

Posted on Dec 17, 2024

🚀 🌟 Why Rust is the Next Big Thing in Programming 🔥

#rust #productivity #discuss #development

🚀 Why Rust is the Next Big Thing in Programming 🔥

Rust is redefining what modern programming means. It offers blazing performance, uncompromising safety, and unparalleled concurrency support. Rust is not only winning hearts across the developer community—it’s transforming industries.

In this comprehensive post, you’ll explore everything you need to know about Rust: its advanced features, use cases, why it’s overtaking languages like C++ and Go, and how big tech companies are adopting it. 🌍

Whether you’re a systems programmer, backend developer, or a tech enthusiast, this post will provide the high-level knowledge and advanced insights that you won’t find elsewhere.

Let’s dive in. 🌟

🦀 1. What is Rust? A Paradigm Shift in Programming

Rust is a modern systems programming language developed by Mozilla. It’s designed to be:

🛡️ Safe: Eliminate entire classes of bugs (memory corruption, data races).
⚡ Fast: Comparable performance to C and C++ without garbage collection.
🌐 Concurrent: Safe multi-threading with zero compromises on safety.

Rust represents a paradigm shift in programming, combining:

The speed of C++.
The safety of managed languages like Java or Go.
A modern developer experience with tools like Cargo.

🚀 2. Why Rust is Gaining Massive Popularity

Rust has achieved something extraordinary in a short span:

✅ Most Loved Programming Language: 8 years in a row on Stack Overflow.

✅ Adoption by Industry Leaders: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

✅ Community Growth: Rust’s developer community is doubling year over year.

Key Reasons Behind Rust’s Rise:

🛡️ Memory Safety without Garbage Collection.
⚡ Zero-Cost Abstractions: Write high-level code without runtime overhead.
🔒 Concurrency Without Fear: Safe parallelism made easy.
🌟 Tooling and Ecosystem: Cargo, Clippy, rustfmt, and more.

🛡️ 3. The Magic of Rust’s Ownership Model 🔑

The ownership system is Rust’s secret sauce. It solves memory management issues at compile-time—without needing garbage collection.

🚀 How Ownership Works:

Every value has a single owner.
Ownership can be borrowed immutably (&) or mutably (&mut).
Once ownership is transferred, the previous owner loses access.

🔍 Why It’s Revolutionary:

🚫 No Null Pointers: Rust prevents dereferencing invalid memory.
🛡️ No Dangling References: Ensures references are valid for their lifetime.
🧠 Compile-Time Guarantees: Bugs are caught before the program runs.

This makes Rust programs both fast and reliable.

🧩 4. How Rust Compares with C++, Go, and Python 🌟

Let’s compare Rust to other leading programming languages.

Feature	🦀 Rust	⚙️ C++	🐍 Python	🔥 Go
Memory Safety	✅ Compile-Time	🚫 Manual, Unsafe	✅ GC Managed	✅ GC Managed
Concurrency	✅ Safe & Easy	🚫 Error-Prone	🟡 Moderate	✅ Built-in Support
Performance	✅ Near Native	✅ Native	🚫 Slow	✅ High Performance
Tooling	✅ Cargo, Clippy	🟡 Limited	✅ Mature	🟡 Moderate
Learning Curve	🟡 Moderate	🚫 Steep	✅ Easy	✅ Easy

🚀 Why Rust Wins:

Rust combines the power of C++ with the simplicity of modern tools. It provides concurrency, safety, and developer ergonomics that other languages can’t match.

🌍 5. Real-World Applications of Rust 🔥

Rust isn’t just for hobbyists—it’s powering critical systems in production.

🚀 Top Use Cases of Rust:

🧩 Operating Systems: Rust is used for Redox OS, a modern OS built for safety.
🌐 WebAssembly: Rust compiles to WASM for high-performance web apps.
🔗 Blockchain: Projects like Solana and Polkadot rely on Rust’s speed.
🦾 Embedded Systems: Rust powers IoT devices and robotics.
🎮 Game Engines: Engines like Bevy use Rust for next-gen game development.
⚡ Backend Servers: Companies like Discord replaced Python with Rust.
🧠 Machine Learning: Libraries like tch-rs integrate ML workflows with Rust.

Rust is everywhere, from browsers to blockchain and beyond. 🌐

🏢 6. Top Tech Companies Using Rust 🚀

Rust has earned the trust of industry giants:

🏢 Company	💡 Use Case
Mozilla	Parts of Firefox & Servo browser engine
Amazon AWS	Firecracker VMs for lightweight containers
Microsoft	Security-critical components in Windows
Dropbox	Sync engine rewritten for performance gains
Meta	Tools to replace legacy C++ components
Google	Experimental projects for safer systems design
Discord	Rewrote infrastructure to reduce latency

Rust delivers tangible improvements in performance, reliability, and developer productivity.

💡 7. Rust’s Advanced Features for Developers

🔒 1. Zero-Cost Abstractions

High-level features like iterators and traits have zero runtime overhead.

⚡ 2. Fearless Concurrency

Rust’s type system and ownership model ensure thread-safe code by design.

🚀 3. Async/Await for Modern Programming

Rust’s async/await syntax provides non-blocking I/O for building highly scalable applications.

🛠️ 4. Tooling and Ecosystem

Cargo: Build, test, and manage dependencies effortlessly.
Clippy: A linter that makes Rust code cleaner and more idiomatic.
Rustfmt: Automatically format code to maintain consistency.

🌟 8. How to Start Learning Rust Today

Ready to join the Rust revolution? 🚀 Follow these steps:

📌 1. Install Rust

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

📌 2. Create Your First Program

cargo new hello_rust  
cd hello_rust  
cargo run

📚 3. Learn from the Best Resources

The Rust Programming Language Book 📖
Rustlings: Hands-on exercises to practice Rust.
The Rust Community: Join discussions on Discord, Reddit, and GitHub.

🚀 Conclusion: Rust is the Future of Programming 🌍

Rust isn’t just another programming language—it’s a revolution. 🚀

It provides the perfect combination of performance, safety, and modern tools. With adoption growing across industries and developer love soaring, Rust is well on its way to becoming the default systems language of the future.

🌟 If you’re a developer, learning Rust will give you a competitive edge in building the next generation of software.

📝 What are your thoughts on Rust? Have you tried it yet? Drop your comments below and let’s keep the conversation going! 💬

💖 If you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to give it a ❤️ and share it with your fellow developers!

Top comments (19)

James • Dec 21 '24

I was planning on learning Rust to start building on Solana, coming from JS/TS background and seeing all these comments, i am doubting my choices :lol

leob • Dec 18 '24 • Edited

What I noticed (back when I attempted to learn it) is that Rust has a heavy "functional" (FP) feel - yes, it is "mixed paradigm" (imperative and OO and FP), not pure FP, but the whole type system, with "abstract data types", and with its emphasis on "mutable" ('side effects') versus "immutable" reminded me a LOT of a language like Haskell !

While admittedly it's not a pure FP language, you could say that it's by far the most popular current mainstream language that has a heavy "FP feel" to it.

What I like about Rust is that it's unique and innovative, and very well conceived - the memory model (borrowing and so on) is indeed what's unique and what really makes it "special", it's a pretty genius piece of work.

The only serious drawback that I see is its huge learning curve - I think for that reason many companies will still choose GoLang (or just JS/TS) ...

All in all, great to see Rust gaining market share, but I don't see it becoming "dominant" :)

Doğa Armangil • Dec 18 '24 • Edited

If eliminating garbage collection is such a nice thing to have, then other languages could start supporting it as well.

The same way as many languages have already copied JavaScript’s ~~async/await pattern~~ event loop.

Doğa Armangil • Dec 21 '24 • Edited

And I'll add here this thought:

I think the main reason why Mozilla is pushing Rust so aggressively to the market is not because Rust is so much better than other languages✤ but because Mozilla is looking for a reason to justify its existence. Personally I haven't touched Firefox more than a couple of times in the past 5 years, and Firefox usage percentage is in the low single digits worldwide.

—
✤ Although obviating the need for a garbage collector is certainly innovative.

Michał Fita • Jun 30

Absolute bollocks - Mozilla fired almost all Rust engineers long ago and doesn't push anything any more.

Al Gonzalez • Dec 18 '24

You mean copied from C# right? 2011/12 for C# vs 2017 for JavaScript ;-)

Doğa Armangil • Dec 21 '24 • Edited

I meant to say "event loop", not "async/await" (updated my initial post). The real innovation was the event loop, not async/await. To my knowledge JS was the first to have an event loop, feel free to correct. AFAIK JS didn't copy anything from C#, I think the async/await pattern was the outcome of a collective effort by the programming community of trying to figure out how to program the event loop. If you know who the author of the async/await pattern is, feel free to reply.

The event loop does not really need async/await, Promises are enough for that, although async/await is much nicer to program with.

Paul Ritter • Dec 19 '24

"copied js async/await"... it's more correct to say that js did the copying 😉
softwareengineering.stackexchange....

Doğa Armangil • Dec 21 '24 • Edited

I meant to say "event loop", not "async/await". The real innovation was the event loop, not async/await. AFAIK JavaScript was the first language to come up with the event loop concept. Many languages copied the event loop from JS, not the other other way round. Feel free to correct if you have any additional info about that.

Nicolas Talle • Dec 19 '24 • Edited

Lots of positive points in the article but there are negatives too, it's good to show them too.

Productivity in Rust is slow.
Rust is not really guaranteed memory-safe. Still, there are risks, you will never be fully secure.
The build time is looong (slow).
Learning curve is steep

Michał Fita • Jun 30

I'm more productive in Rust than in Python. So, how Rust productivity is low?

Rust is not really guaranteed memory-safe. Still, there are risks, you will never be fully secure.

Right, so not secure at all is better than really good Rust's guarantees?

The build time is looong (slow)

Based on what? It's much faster today than 1.5years ago.

Tomáš Karela Procházka • Dec 17 '24 • Edited

Go and moderate tooling? Bruh!
I get it, it would break your table 😂

If something, Go has less safe type system in comparison to Rust. And ofc GC affects speed.

Meanwhile Python has matured mess. Pyenv, venv, virtualenv, pipenv, pip, conda, poetry,... 😂 Already mess, and we didn't deploy yet. gunicorn, uvicorn, uwsgi, wsgi ...

Vaibhav Kaushal • Dec 19 '24 • Edited

I humbly disagree. I compiled zellij today. Took about 15 minutes (minutes!!!!) on my orange pi 5. A behemoth go codebase with at least 10x code that I have compiled within 4.

I remember installing LunarVim too. That too wanted to use some rust tools and compilation is such a pain that I don't wanna deal with Rust if I have to compile anything. I will sacrifice some of that runtime speed to give me some dev speed with go - which is just as safe and almost just as a fast - at least good enough for most usecases anyway.

In a world where people install Electron app, saving 1 millisecond per request is acceptable against that abyssmal compilation speeds.

Lucas Sproule • Dec 17 '24

The learning curve for C++ is the same as rust. You just like the learning curve for rust better. C++ is being pressured by rust to do better with safety, and I think that's great.