According to Stack Overflow, Rust is one of the languages coders love the most. Many individuals enjoy using the Rust programming language for a wide variety of purposes and find it extremely useful in numerous situations. In short, the popularity of Rust has been on the rise for the past couple of years.
What makes Rust so popular? The short answer is that it managed to overcome issues many other programming languages face. The overall number of drawbacks that would prolong the time we spend coding is much lower than that of other languages such as C. Many think that Rust creators had mistakes from C in mind when they developed the language.
Speaking of creators, did you know that Rust was the brainchild of the same people who made Mozilla? With this in mind, let’s see why Rust is prevalent nowadays.
- Rust Has Better Memory Safety
Rust was built to make a better programming language than the C language family. One of the most significant issues that C faced was memory management. That’s why Rust creators paid particular attention to memory safety — there are no dangling pointers or null pointers in Rust. Rust users can enjoy excellent memory safety that doesn’t rely on garbage collection.
- Rust Makes Coding Easier
Everything seems more comfortable with Rust, meaning newcomers can write low-level code by using this programming language. Semantics is much better defined compared to C languages and undefined behavior is not as common.
In other words, you don’t have to be a professional Rust coder to write simple code in Rust.
- Growing Community Support & Number of Frameworks
We’ll admit it – Rust’s community is much smaller compared to that of the C community. However, the good news is that coders around the globe started to realize why Rust is better than other languages, and the number of community members has been actively increasing for the past couple of years.
This is also applied to the number of available frameworks. While there are still quite a few of them available for Rust, there are far more frameworks for C languages. However, Rust’s frameworks are actively being developed, which means that their number is already rapidly increasing.
- Big Companies Invest in Rust
Mozzila was the first one to use Rust, and the result of that is Firefox Quantum, which was released recently.
However, other big companies also decided to work with Rust. For example, Google used it for Fuchsia, while Amazon found it helpful for Firecracker. Even Facebook joined the Rust hype by using it for Mononoke.
- No BDFL
Rust doesn’t rely on a Benevolent Dictator for Life, which means the language doesn’t have one person who has the final say in decisions related to it. Instead, Rust consists of several teams and working groups and uses the AI requests system to make public decisions.
Conclusion: Rust Will Be Big
To sum up, Rust’s popularity has been on the rise lately as the language offers both technological improvements (compared to other languages) and a different governance system.
In a world that leans toward decentralized systems, Rust seems like a logical option for many coders, which is why its popularity will be inevitable in the future.
