What is Rust?
Rust is described as a general-purpose language for creating safe, secure, and scalable applications. Initially designed as a systems programming language, it has evolved to be versatile enough for a variety of application types, including systems programming, web services, desktop applications, and embedded systems. Rust is an open-source programming language efforts on performance and safety. It gets chance in the area C++, to control over low-level details like memory usage. Rust uses LLVM for backend and supports platforms and architectures, such as x86, ARM, WebAssembly (Wasm), Linux, Mac, and Windows. Distinct languages with garbage collection, Rust has no runtime or garbage collection process. It is not a simple language, as it aims to bridge the gap between modern, safe languages and the skill to control the raw capabilities of the machine.
Why We Learn Rust?
Learning Rust can be a satisfying journey, helping you reveal its benefits and how it is changing perceptions of programming. Rust is reliably ranked as the most loved programming language in surveys, having won the category in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey every year since 2016. It was also named the “most wanted programming language” in 2022. Developers find it a happiness to write, and once the code compiles, it generally works as expected. The Rust compiler suggestively reduce the errors or undefined behaviour. Learning Rust allows you to program with confidence in a wider variety of domains. Rust is helpful for large development teams because, its compiler acting as a gatekeeper, catching delicate bugs early on. It is also recommended for students interested in systems concepts and those new to programming in that domain, as the community is welcoming. People choose Rust because of the execution speed of Rust programs and the productivity in writing them, coupled with the compiler’s checks ensure stability. Learning Rust helps you move beyond basic language theory into building real-world applications.
Benefits of Rust
- Safety: Rust guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector. A special tool called the borrow checker enforces rigorous restrictions about variable ownership at build time, hence achieving this. Including uninitialised variables, double-frees, use-after-free problems, NULL pointer dereferences, neglected locked mutexes, data races between threads, and iterator invalidation, this compile-time memory safety stops whole classes of typical programming mistakes. Especially in parallel applications, the type system and memory model help to create safety characteristics. Rust’s compile-time tests stop run-time exploits that may otherwise be used. Although the majority of Rust code is “safe Rust” with assured memory safety, there is a “unsafe Rust” part that relaxes some regulations for particular low-level tasks done at the programmer’s risk. The aim, then, is usually to provide safe APIs using unsafe code, as is done in the standard library.
- Performance: Rust was created with performance in mind. Like C and C++, it provides programmers close control over memory and keeps a close link between language commands and machine operations. Rust aims for “zero-cost abstractions,” or faster compilation of higher-level features down to lower-level code as manually written code. This lets one create very quick code without sacrificing safety. Benchmarks contrasting Rust web frameworks—such as Actix Web and Rocket—with frameworks in other languages—such as Flask, Falcon, and NestJS—show Rust frameworks managing far more requests and data moved, even beating Golang in certain comparisons. Rust’s performance qualifies it for concurrent systems, code acceleration for other languages, and performance-critical applications.
- Security: Rust integrally helps secure development by providing a safe coding environment to reduces the attack surface. Rust’s safety guarantees result in fewer vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit. Compile-time checks help avoid runtime vulnerabilities. Rust’s safety features make it well-matched for sensitive areas like cryptography and aggressive environments.
- Scalability: Rust is defined as a general-purpose language for creating scalable applications. The type system further helps in achieving scalability.
- Purpose and Other Goals: Rust’s purpose providing effective memory management through features like ownership. Its greatest drive is to eliminate the traditional trade-offs programmers have accepted between safety and productivity, and between speed and comfort design. It aims to challenge the struggle between high-level comfort design and low-level control. Rust focuses on reliability and safety without sacrificing performance.
Comparision with Other Languages
Rust is defined as “Different!”. While its syntax is based on C and C++, the similarity ends there. Rust’s unique features, like the borrow checker and ownership system, are a major departure from C-based languages and are foreign concepts to developers from backgrounds. The structures provide memory safety and avoid bugs are common in languages like C and C++ where memory management is manual.
Some languages, like Java, Go, Python, and JavaScript, use garbage collection to automatically handle memory. Rust, on the other hand, doesn’t need this process to keep memory safe. These languages make sure that memory is safe, but trash collection takes time and extra resources. While Rust has memory safety at the high level, like dynamic languages like Python, it also has memory safety at the low level, like C/C++. This lets Rust break the usual rule that you have to choose between speed and safety.
Because Rust is tightly typed, it needs more planning and type definition up front than languages that change types on the fly, like Python or JavaScript. At first, this can feel like a high learning curve. For writers coming from dynamic languages, this is sometimes called “fighting the borrow checker.” But this strictness and the helpfulness of the engine make writing stable code a lot easier. Because it works with systems programming along with C/C++, Rust is harder to write when the only goal is to make developers more productive than languages like Go, Python, Ruby, or Elixir.
In an “out with the old, in with the new” way of thinking, Rust mostly likes concepts like traits, generics, and functional programming over object-oriented programming. Testing in Rust is also different from testing in most other languages because it comes with built-in testing tools that aren’t usually found in other languages. Many idioms from C and C++ don’t work in Rust code, so it doesn’t look very much like normal C or C++ code. People say that Rust’s restrictions are flexible enough for most tasks, even though they require changes to current code styles. The benefits of getting rid of common bugs make the work worth it.
What is LLVM?
LLVM stands for “Low Level Virtual Machine”. It is a project that serves as the basis or backend for the Rust compiler, rustc.
Because rustc is based on the LLVM project, any platform for which LLVM has an appropriate backend is supported by Rust. LLVM supports many platforms and architectures, including RISC-V.
Within the context of using inline assembly (asm!) in Rust, the several interactions with LLVM:
- All supported targets follow the assembly code syntax used by LLVM’s internal assembler, which aligns with the GNU assembler (GAS) syntax.
- The register distributers used in LLVM (and GCC) are sometimes unable to handle tied operands with different types.
- Certain registers, like the frame pointer and base pointer, are reserved for internal use by LLVM. While asm! statements cannot clearly specify reserved registers, LLVM may allocate them for reg operands in some cases.
- The asm! template modifiers in Rust are a subset of those supported by LLVM’s (and GCC’s) asm template argument modifiers. Some LLVM modifiers are not yet implemented.
- LLVM’s generated code is relevant when considering asm! clobbers, as Rust’s compiler updates clobber lists as architectures gain new registers that LLVM starts using.
LLVM is involved in compiling code to WebAssembly (Wasm), helping the compiler understand exported interfaces. The libFuzzer library, used for fuzz testing, is also described as being part of the LLVM project.