Introduction to Rust Programming
Rust is a statically and strongly typed multi-paradigm programming language which is focused on performance and security.
Rust is quite flexible. It can be used to build game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components and practically anything you can imagine. This language is developed from scratch by Graydon Hoare for Mozilla and later refined until it reached a stable version for release.
Why use Rust ?
Rust is really fast. It reaches to the speed comparable to C++. It plays very well with systems that require intense safety and concurrency by defining strong security barriers, ensuring the system’s protection at its core.
This focus on safety is by its design and can be seen anywhere in the language. For example: When you declare a new variable, by default it’s always a constant and immutable. In order to make it a variable, you have to explicitly define that it’s a variable and it’s value can change.
Rust also worries a lot about memory safety by not allowing, for example, null pointers. When it comes to data values, you can only initialize them via a bunch of predefined ways (all of which require a default value to work).
In case of garbage collection, it doesn’t adopt the common systems used by Java or C#. Rather than this, Rust uses a convention called Resource acquisition is Initialization (RAAI) which means the references to objects, disk space etc are kept at a specific part of a memory and automatically managed by Rust whenever the memory needs to be emptied.
Getting started
Rust support variety of operating systems. It can be installed via rustup, a command line tool for managing rust versions and associated tools. To install it, you can follow the official detailed guide present at https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch01-01-installation.html
Rust playground
You can also run Rust directly in browser in case you don’t wish to install it. Rust has an official playground for playing around the language code. It can be accessed on https://play.rust-lang.org/.
This is a basic introduction on Rust. If you like this, make sure you follow https://medium.com/rusticles for upcoming tutorials on Rust.
