What is Rust and why is it so popular?
Over the last couple of months I&#x27;ve been slowly, but steadily playing with Rust. I work on embedded systems and while it&#x27;s gaining traction only slowly, it feels to me reasonably likely that we&#x27;ll be seeing non-trivial applications in the next 8-10 years. I doubt that we&#x27;ll see it used for low-power&#x2F;resource-constrained firmware, but lots and lots of embedded systems are now bulky Linux boxes with years of uptime, and I can see Rust making inroads there. It&#x27;s not a bad idea to be ready for this, just in case it turns out to be a revolution.<p>Honestly, I like it, and for all the non-hyped reasons.<p>Like ownership. Lots of us in the embedded space aren&#x27;t so impressed by the extra memory safety because, if you allocate all your memory statically, there are fewer ways to screw things up with references, and it&#x27;s a lot easier to do bounds checking, so fewer bugs slip in. Not that &quot;even fewer&quot; isn&#x27;t good, it&#x27;s just that the impact is less dramatic than in application code.<p><i>But</i>: the borrow checker still pesters me about something I&#x27;ve written every once in a while. And every once in a while, what it pesters me about is a data race that would have definitely bit me in the back sooner or later. It has no security implications, I guess, and it wouldn&#x27;t crash my program, but it&#x27;s still wrong. Yay!<p>Or like traits, which are just so refreshingly sane.<p>Lots of people are hung up on security and segfaults, and spend far less time talking about a far less categorical property: the conventions that Rust enforces make it easier to write correct code. <i>Sometimes</i> it&#x27;s not straightforward code, mind you, but &quot;works right&quot; trumps &quot;fits in a single line&quot; in my book...<p>In many ways, Rust is what C++ could have been if it had not been designed by saying yes to everything. I guess it&#x27;s not <i>there</i> yet, but there&#x27;s a chance it might be.<p>On a more, uh, philosophical note, I think it&#x27;s pretty cool that our industry has been granted a second chance in this regard. We&#x27;ve already been given Ada, and we missed the chance to adopt it on a wide enough scale to make a difference. Maybe we won&#x27;t miss this chance.