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The Rust language aims to offer:
- Uncompromising performance and control,
- Prevention of many categories of bugs such as concurrency issues,
- Ergonomics at the height of languages like Python and Ruby.
A year separates version 1.8.0 and the released version of version 1.0.0. To be more specific, this represents nearly 12,000 commits, and no less than 700 contributors. Remarkably, the language has become the most popular language for developers on StackOverflow.
The Rust anniversary article also offers concrete cases of adopting the language:
- The DropBox use case is particularly interesting because it highlights how the company used Rust to develop the software to control the hardware they developed in an effort to become self-sufficient. screws from Amazon Web Services. Needless to underline the criticality of the task for a company which decides to operate on its own equipment on such a scale. While DropBox's back-end infrastructure has historically been written in Go, key issues such as memory footprint and lack of control over server usage have prompted components to be rewritten in Rust. According to Jamie Turner, the advantages of Rust are numerous: advanced abstraction capabilities, no nulls, no segfaults, no leaks, but close to C performance and adequate memory control.
- In a second feedback, the article tells us about Servo, and peripheral developments that are slowly starting to land in the Firefox code base, among other things, the mp4 metadata parsing task on OSX and Linux since Firefox version 45 . Although the code still works in test mode, no less than 1 billion execution reports have been compared with the C++ version with 100% accuracy. This example, however, remains the visible part of the iceberg, since other pieces of code should be integrated in the long term.
During this first year, the focus was given particularly to improving Rust, both on the ecosystem part, as well as on the supported platforms, the tools, the compiler, or even the language itself. The article details each of these categories.
The first Rust language conference, RustConf, is scheduled for September 9-10, 2016 in Portland. If the Rust language is of interest to you, and you live in Europe, don't worry, RustFest is also scheduled for Berlin on September 17, 2016.
Finally, if you want to follow Rust news, you can subscribe to the This week in Rust newsletter to keep up to date with what's new in the ecosystem.