Why Rust?

why-rust.md

Introduction

• Systems programming language (safety & control)
• Stack (default) vs. heap allocated vars
• Statically typed, although the type inference is pretty sweet
• Statement and expression based langguage
• Features structs, enums and traits
• Static (favored) & dynamic method dispatch
• Has generics & type bounds
• Small language, well documentated stdlib
• Code organization: creates & modules
• Cargo is the project build & dep mgmt tool
• crates.io is where third-party libs live

Prgramming paradigms

• Functional (expressions)
  • Pattern matching
  • Closures
  • HOFs
  • Immutable vals by default
• Imperative (statements)

Safety first!

• Automatic memory mgmt w/o a garbage collector (mem is freed for u)
• No use-after-free or undefined behavior problems
• Aliasing + mutation is not allowed (N &T or exactly 1 &mut T)
• Ownership & borrowing model (static, compile time analysis)
• The compiler enforces the data moves (ownership is retured back up the stack)

Ease of use

• Type inference
• Destructuring via let & match
• No nil concept. The Result<T, E> & Option types are used for error handling
• No exceptions - panic!s are used as a last result (following the let it crash approach)
• Lisp-style macros (println!, vec!)

Concurrency

• No data races b/c the same ownership/borrowing mechanism is used
• Channels (ownership is 1st transferred to the channel itself)

Digging deeper

• The Rust Programming Language (Google Talk)
• Steve Klabnik on Why Rust
• The Rust book
• See it work: Rust by example
• Whet your appetive with a pet project or two
• The Rust blog

Community

• #rust on irc.mozilla.org
• @rustlang on Twitter
• This Week in Rust (weekly newsletter)