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Shariq Ahmed
Shariq Ahmed

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What is Rust and Why is it Popular?

Rust

Rust was developed in 2006 by American software developer Graydon Hoare. But, like Dart, it wasn't popular back then. Rust started gaining recognition because of its efficiency in building high-performing applications. Developers were able to write efficient codes without fretting about data races.

And because of Rust's error handling, garbage collection, memory management, performance, scalability, security, and speed, some even started preferring it over Python. There were also some developers who were mesmerized by its speed. That's because of Rust's memory ownership model that is applied at compile time. Maybe that's why Amazon, Discord, Dropbox, Google, and Meta, started adopting it. And then its popularity further soared in 2020, when Rust started supporting the Linux kernel.

Now, although there are lots of amazing frameworks released, why are developers still using Rust? Well, they are using Rust to build secure large-scale systems. Further, Rust provides easy cross-platform development. It has one of the most simple integrations with other languages. There are also lifetime references in Rust and there are almost zero concurrent programming and memory issues in Rust.

One thing that I find different in Rust is its two modes: safe and unsafe Rust. In the first mode, code is efficient because of different restrictions on the coder. In the second mode, you can write code without any restrictions.

Further, Rust is a kind of all-purpose language. You can create web applications, and backend systems for data science, and make system and network programming.

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