The rising popularity of the Rust programming language

Hanno Labuschagne

Hanno Labuschagne

Journalist
Staff member
Joined
Sep 2, 2019
Messages
6,489
Reaction score
4,779
The rising popularity of the Rust programming language

Rust is not currently ranked highly on programming language popularity indices like PYPL and TIOBE, but it is a rising star in the software development world.

Growing out of a personal project started by Graydon Hoare in 2006, Rust is a programming language that focuses on performance, and guaranteeing memory- and thread-safety.

This not only helps catch many types of bugs when code is being compiled into a program or software library, but it also reduces the risk of critical security vulnerabilities which frequently rely on memory handling bugs.
 
In before the usual "PHP is the best" comment

I have been contemplating playing around with Rust for a while now, should probably give it a try before it becomes the next JavaScript with vocal shills that will go to the ends of the earth to show that JavaScript is the only solution they need
 
But what makes it unique rather than another way to write code with the same constructs? C is already as close to assembler as you're going to get so I don't see better performance as a thing. As for memory and type safety that's a compiler component so you can have safe or unsafe C code.

The main issue I have is that these additions could let you have code that only throws an error and quits when an exploit is used so business just continues as usual. You can have code that is buggy as hell and you'd never know until it is ported and the exploits become apparent.
 
do you start naked when learning this language


i suppose a lot of people only wear a shirt when on cam meetings these days, lol
 
I suspect rust is gaining popularity due to the ruffle flash player emulator for playing defunct flash content.
 
Swa said:
But what makes it unique rather than another way to write code with the same constructs? C is already as close to assembler as you're going to get so I don't see better performance as a thing. As for memory and type safety that's a compiler component so you can have safe or unsafe C code.

The main issue I have is that these additions could let you have code that only throws an error and quits when an exploit is used so business just continues as usual. You can have code that is buggy as hell and you'd never know until it is ported and the exploits become apparent.
Click to expand...
It's a nice read. Light on technical jargon/examples though.

 
  • Like
Reactions: Swa
access said:
do you start naked when learning this language


i suppose a lot of people only wear a shirt when on cam meetings these days, lol
Click to expand...
I think it's called Rust, not Bare. :p
 
Mystic Twilight said:
I suspect rust is gaining popularity due to the ruffle flash player emulator for playing defunct flash content.
Click to expand...
No, more likely things like VS Code made it popular so people learnt about it and since direct comparison to C/C++ in performance you'd get a lot of people interested, especially since MS. There are a lot of companies that follow anything that MS does.
 
It offers higher level abstractions than C, and isn’t as convoluted as C++, so I can see the appeal. I don’t think it would ever be a solution for the most performance critical of applications, but when reasonably close is enough is good enough, it’s probably a great choice.

I expect that one of the largest inhibitors, is that if requirements change to “performance critical”, you’ve likely painted yourself into a bit of a corner. Projects that were likely to choose Rust for performance in the first place are much more likely to have this constraint belatedly imposed.
 
What problem does it solve that would make one learn yet another language?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Swa
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X