12 Lessons: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 23:03, 8 January 2025

Rust was created to address critical limitations in existing programming languages, particularly in terms of performance, safety, and concurrency. Its design focuses on delivering memory safety without the overhead of a garbage collector, which is achieved through strict ownership and borrowing rules. These rules ensure that issues like null pointer dereferences and data races are prevented at compile time, enhancing reliability in systems programming and other performance-critical domains.

Performance is a cornerstone of Rust’s design, offering execution speeds comparable to C and C++ by compiling directly to machine code. The language provides developers with fine-grained control over system resources, making it suitable for tasks that demand high efficiency, such as embedded systems, operating systems, and real-time applications. Unlike languages that trade off control for safety, Rust balances both through its innovative approach to memory management.

Concurrency is another area where Rust excels. Its ownership model ensures that thread safety is guaranteed at compile time, allowing developers to write concurrent programs with confidence. By eliminating data races and other common pitfalls, Rust simplifies the development of software that scales across multiple processors or handles numerous tasks simultaneously.

In addition to its technical strengths, Rust includes modern tooling and an extensive ecosystem to support developers. Features such as the built-in package manager, Cargo, and a strong type system streamline development workflows and encourage best practices. Originally developed at Mozilla for building a safer and faster browser engine, Servo, Rust has since evolved into a versatile, general-purpose programming language. Its applicability now spans a wide range of domains, from systems programming to web development, making it a preferred choice for developers prioritising both safety and performance.

I've been working with Rust since 2022 mainly for the advantages it brings as listed above and because I'm building healthcare apps which / performing heath technology research work, and it is perfect for this type of fast safety critical application especially using Ferrocene.

In my time learning and using rust I've come up with 12 lessons which I wish I had know before starting.

Cargo, Crates, use, and the CLI
Types, Casting, Mutability, & the Stack and Heap
[[Scope, Consumption,

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 Rust was created to address critical limitations in existing programming languages, particularly in terms of performance, safety, and concurrency. Its design focuses on delivering memory safety without the overhead of a [[wikipedia:Garbage_collection_(computer_science)|garbage collector]], which is achieved through strict ownership and borrowing rules. These rules ensure that issues like null pointer dereferences and data races are prevented at compile time, enhancing reliability in systems programming and other performance-critical domains.