Rust (programming language)

Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety—ensuring that all references point to valid memory—without requiring the use of a garbage collector or reference counting present in other memory-safe languages. To simultaneously enforce memory safety and prevent data races, its "borrow checker" tracks the object lifetime of all references in a program during compilation. Rust borrows ideas from functional programming, including static types, immutability, higher-order functions, and algebraic data types. It is popular for systems programming. Software developer Graydon Hoare created Rust as a personal project while working at Mozilla Research in 2006. Mozilla officially sponsored the project in 2009. Since the first stable release in May 2015, Rust has been adopted by companies including Amazon, Discord, Dropbox, Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft. In December 2022, it became the first language other than C and assembly to be supported in the development of the Linux kernel. Rust has been noted for its growth as a newer language and has been the subject of academic programming languages research. Rust grew out of a personal project begun in 2006 by Mozilla Research employee Graydon Hoare. Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009 as a part of the ongoing development of an experimental browser engine called Servo, which was officially announced by Mozilla in 2010. During the same year, work shifted from the initial compiler written in OCaml to a self-hosting compiler based on LLVM written in Rust. The new Rust compiler successfully compiled itself in 2011. Hoare later said that Rust was named after the rust fungus, with reference to the fungus's hardiness. Rust's type system underwent significant changes between versions 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4. In version 0.2, which was released in March 2012, classes were introduced for the first time. Four months later, version 0.3 added destructors and polymorphism, through the use of interfaces.