There is no dearth of web development tools and programming languages today. However, there is a strong demand for comprehensive tools and languages to help developers build super-functional apps and programs. When developers just starting in their careers look for prominent programming languages to get hands-on with, a major chunk of the population will lay their hands on JAVA, Python, Swift, and more.
Having said that, a lot of developers overlook a programming language that is hailed as one of the dark horses in the enterprise web development spectrum. It’s called Rust, and it has been voted as the most loved language by developers for five consecutive years. Close to 84% of the programmers loved Rust, according to a Stack Overflow survey. Ironically though, Rust has hardly made it to the list of top 5 programming languages globally.
With this post, we aim at spreading the word about Rust language for web development by shedding light on the features and benefits of the programming language. When many developers get an idea of what Rust is all about, they wouldn’t think twice about exploring it for their projects.
So, let’s get started.
What Is Rust?
It was the year 2012 when Rust made its way out of its research labs. Mozilla spotted a language engineer named Graydon Hoare, who had been developing this language for over six years (since 2006). Identifying the potential of the language, Mozilla immediately set up a lab for Graydon and dedicated a separate team of developers to fast-track the development process.
Cut to 2012, Mozilla officially introduced Rust to the world.
While this is the backstory, Rust was technically launched to deal with and overcome the shortcomings of the C programming language. Though C was (or is) a powerful language, developers had been long battling memory management, and Rust gave them ideal solutions to write code in less memory. Apart from seamless memory management functionality, Rust offers a range of other features and benefits. Let’s look at them individually.
8 Reasons You Should Consider Rust For Your Next Web Development Project
Efficient Templates
Rust is one of the ideal programming languages for web templates. With Tera and Handlebar handling a major chunk of the processes, Rust allows you to track the ownership of variables and implement a static dispatch of traits. This makes the language significantly swifter than other languages. For instance, when it comes to the implementation of Handlebar, Rust functions at twice the speed of JavaScript.
Robust Memory Management
One of the fundamentals of system programming is that memory control should be at the least level. If you have worked with C, you would know that it involves manual memory management, which could get frustrating after a point.
On the other hand, Rust is a game-changer thanks to its convenience in terms of memory management. Because no garbage collectors are functioning in the background, Rust can access memory and hardware directly. This offers a coding environment that feels similar to using microcontrollers to developers. This allows you to make unlimited changes and modifications to your code without worrying about memory safety.
Static Typing Allows For Maintainability
Rust is what developers call a strongly-typed language. For the uninitiated, this means that it is difficult to fumble on Rust - that you will struggle to write an incorrect program. Management of complexities lies at the heart of functional programming. When your code grows, what simultaneously grows is its complexity. Rust being a statically-typed language also paves the way for high levels of simplicity by letting you know what’s happening in your code. By eliminating the need to repeat types of variables repeatedly, also fosters an environment for easy maintainability.
Fast And High Performing
Remember we mentioned Rust doesn’t have any garbage collector running in the background? Well, that’s one of the reasons Rust is significantly faster than other programming languages. There are no runtime checks, and Rust’s compiler even eliminates wrong code at the early stages. This ensures there is no incorrect code stagnating and corrupting your system.
As far as performance is concerned, we’re sure developers would unanimously agree that Rust performs way better than C++ and even Python. Its speed is incredible with embedded systems as well.
Cross-Platform Development
For applications and solutions requiring minimal time to market, Rust is a web programming tool, which becomes an ideal choice. Thanks to its cross-platform development functionalities, you can just code once and roll out your solution across multiple operating systems such as Mac, Windows, Linux, and more. The best part is that developers can build both frontend and backend aspects of their applications with Rust. Thanks to the incorporation of frameworks like Actix, Nickel, and Rocket, the development process becomes easier as well.
Insane Community
Rust has an amazing community that makes your orientation to the language simple. If you are starting new, you’ll obviously have tons of questions and clarifications on the programming language. However, community members and volunteers take care of everything, and you will find super-helpful resources online. The community is active, and you can even post your questions and get answers directly from Rust pros and veterans out there.
Expanded Ecosystem
After being hailed as the most loved programming language for the fifth time, Rust’s prominence is increasing worldwide. Developers are starting to see Rust as an ecosystem rather than just a compiler or a programming language. They realize that the standard of quality that software development dictates is delivered by Rust with its host of features and libraries.
For instance, its’ CLI tool - Cargo - helps developers manage dependencies, conduct tests, generate documentation, and more.
Besides, Rust also has neat documentation that offers a minimal learning curve for beginners. Talking of beginners, Rust also makes benchmarking, property-driven testing, and fuzzing easily accessible to freshers.
Companies Using Rust
Dropbox One of the premier cloud solutions, Dropbox stakeholders, reveal that Nucleus was written in Rust. It is shared that Rust’s emphasis on correctness and its ergonomics made them prefer Rust. The developers were able to instill complex invariants in the type system and have Rust’s compilers check them.
Figma The developers of Figma reveal that their experience with Rust has been immensely positive. They share that Rust has a good community and a solid core.
Amazon seems to love Rust. It has been used to write high-performing and safe software applications for infrastructure-level networking systems. Amazon’s Firecrackers was written in Rust and launched in 2018. Amazon also uses Rust as part of its Amazon S3 services, EC2 services, and its more recent Linux-based OS - Bottlerocket.
Wrapping Up
Rust is definitely a promising programming language that every developer should get hands-on with and explore. With its increasing prominence, we believe that the future for Rust will be inevitable. It will attract more developers to itself and become omnipresent in the coming months and years. It could also be seen as an alternative to JavaScript.
What do you think?