9 reasons why Rust programmers love Rust

The 2018 survey of the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings marked the entry of a new programming language in their Top 25 list. It has been an incredibly successful year for the Rust programming language in terms of its popularity. It also jumped from the 46th most popular language on GitHub to the 18th position.

The Stack overflow survey of 2018 is another indicator of the rise of Rust programming language. Almost 78% of the developers who are working with Rust loved working on it. It topped the list of the most loved programming language among the developers who took the survey for a straight third year in the row. Not only that but it ranked 8th in the most wanted programming language in the survey, which means that the respondent of the survey who has not used it yet but would like to learn.

Although, Rust was designed as a low-level language, best suited for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code, it is gaining a lot of traction and presents a great opportunity for web developers and game developers. RUST is also empowering novice developers with the tools to start shipping code fast.

So, why is Rust so tempting? Let’s explore the high points of this incredible language and understand the variety of features that make it interesting to learn.

Automatic Garbage Collection

Garbage collection and non-memory resources often create problems with some systems languages. But Rust pays no head to garbage collection and removes the possibilities of failures caused by them.

In Rust, garbage collection is completely taken care of by RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization).

Better support for Concurrency

Concurrency and parallelism are incredibly imperative topics in computer science and are also a hot topic in the industry today. Computers are gaining more and more cores, yet many programmers aren’t prepared to fully utilize the power of them. Handling concurrent programming safely and efficiently is another major goal of Rust language.

Concurrency is difficult to reason about. In Rust, there is a strong, static type system that helps to reason about your code. As such, Rust also gives you two traits Send and Sync to help you make sense of code that can possibly be concurrent.

Rust’s standard library also provides a library for threads, which enable you to run Rust code in parallel. You can also use Rust’s threads as a simple isolation mechanism.

Error Handling in Rust is beautiful

A programmer is bound to make errors, irrespective of the programming language they use. Making errors while programming is normal, but it’s the error handling mechanism of that programming language, which enhances the experience of writing the code. In Rust, errors are divided into types: unrecoverable errors and recoverable errors.

Unrecoverable errors

An error is classified as ‘unrecoverable’ when there is no other option other than to abort the program. The panic! macro in Rust is very helpful in these cases, especially when a bug has been detected in the code but the programmer is not clear how to handle that error. The panic! macro generates a failure message that helps the user to debug a problem. It also helps to stop the execution before more catastrophic events occur.

Recoverable errors

The errors which can be handled easily or which do not have a serious impact on the execution of the program are known as recoverable errors.
It is represented by the Result<T, E>. The Result<T, E> is an enum that consists of two variants, i.e., OK<T> and Err<E>. It describes the possible error in the program.
OK<T>: The ‘T’ is a type of value which returns the OK variant in the success case. It is an expected outcome.
Err<E>: The ‘E’ is a type of error which returns the ERR variant in the failure. It is an unexpected outcome.

Resource Management

The one attribute that makes Rust stand out (and completely overpowers Google’s Go for that matter), is the algorithm used for resource management. Rust follows the C++ lead, with concepts like borrowing and mutable borrowing on the plate and thus resource management becomes an elegant process. Furthermore, Rust didn’t need a second chance to know that resource management is not just about memory usage; the fact that they did it right first time makes them a standout performer on this point.

Although the Rust documentation does a good job of explaining the technical details, the article by Tim explains the concept in a much friendlier and easy to understand language. As such I thought, it would be good to list his points as well here. The following excerpt is taken from the article written by M.Tim Jones.

Reusable code via modules

Rust allows you to organize code in a way that promotes its reuse. You attain this reusability by using modules which are nothing but organized code as packages that other programmers can use. These modules contain functions, structures and even other modules that you can either make public, which can be accessed by the users of the module or you can make it private which can be used only within the module and not by the module user.

There are three keywords to create modules, use modules, and modify the visibility of elements in modules.

• The mod keyword creates a new module
• The use keyword allows you to use the module (expose the definitions into the scope to use them)
• The pub keyword makes elements of the module public (otherwise, they’re private).

Cleaner code with better safety checks

In Rust, the compiler enforces memory safety and another checking that make the programming language safe. Here, you will never have to worry about dangling pointers or bother using an object after it has been freed. These things are part of the core Rust language that allows you to write clean code. Also, Rust includes an unsafe keyword with which you can disable checks that would typically result in a compilation error.

Data types and Collections in Rust

Rust is a statically typed programming language, which means that every value in Rust must have a specified data type. The biggest advantage of static typing is that a large class of errors is identified earlier in the development process.

These data types can be broadly classified into two types: scalar and compound. Scalar data types represent a single value like integer, floating-point, and character, which are commonly present in other programming languages as well. But Rust also provides compound data types which allow the programmers to group multiple values in one type such as tuples and arrays.

The Rust standard library provides a number of data structures which are also called collections. Collections contain multiple values but they are different from the standard compound data types like tuples and arrays which we discussed above. The biggest advantage of using collections is the capability of not specifying the amount of data at compile time which allows the structure to grow and shrink as the program runs. Vectors, Strings, and hash maps are the three most commonly used collections in Rust.

The friendly Rust community

Rust owes it success to the breadth and depth of engagement of its vibrant community, which supports a highly collaborative process for helping the language to evolve in a truly open-source way. Rust is built from the bottom up, rather than any one individual or organization controlling the fate of the technology.

Reliable Robust Release cycles of Rust

What is common between Java, Spring, and Angular? They never release their update when they promise to. The release cycle of the Rust community works with clockwork precision and is very reliable. Here’s an overview of the dates and versions:

In mid-September 2018, the Rust team released Rust 2018 RC1 version. Rust 2018 is the first major new edition of Rust (after Rust 1.0 released in 2015). This new release would mark the culmination of the last three years of Rust’s development from the core team, and brings the language together in one neat package. This version includes plenty of new features like raw identifiers, better path clarity, new optimizations, and other additions. You can learn more about the Rust language and its evolution at the Rust blog and download from the Rust language website.

Note: the headline was edited 09.06.2018 to make it clear that Rust was found to be the most loved language among developers using it.

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