History of Rust

Rust originated as a personal project by Graydon Hoare back in 2006 during his tenure at Mozilla. By 2009, Mozilla recognized Rust's potential to enhance safety and concurrency in systems programming, leading to the company's sponsorship of the project. The language made its public debut with the release of Rust 0.1 in 2010. Since then, it has garnered immense popularity, even being recognized as the "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

Two noteworthy events that piqued my interest in Rust were:

• Linus Torvalds' announcement that Rust would be included in Linux 6.1.
• A tweet from Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's CTO of Azure, urging developers to transition away from starting new projects in C/C++ and to adopt Rust for situations requiring a non-GC language.

Beyond systems programming, Rust has also found applications in Blockchain technology, with projects like Reth, a high-performance implementation of the Ethereum protocol.

Moreover, Rust excels in creating compilers and runtimes, with Deno being a prime example. Deno serves as a modern Javascript and Typescript runtime, built on Rust and Tokio.

Challenges of Learning Rust

While Rust is celebrated for its speed and safety, many developers hesitate to dive into it due to its steep learning curve. The approach required to grasp Rust differs significantly from that needed for more beginner-friendly languages like Go, Ruby, and (let's be honest) Python. As a lower-level language akin to C/C++, mastering Rust necessitates a solid understanding of operating systems and system development. Additionally, as a relatively young language, it has fewer educational resources available compared to more established languages.

About the "Talk Rust" Series

I am excited to introduce a new series of articles titled "Talk Rust," which aims to:

• Establish a strong foundation in Rust fundamentals, such as data types, control structures, and structs.
• Delve into more advanced topics, including ownership, pattern matching, and error handling.
• Guide readers in building a project.

Getting Started with Rust

Installing Rust is straightforward. Simply visit the official Rust website and follow the installation instructions relevant to your operating system:

To verify that Rust has been installed correctly, you can run:

rustc --version

Now, you're all set to embark on your Rust journey!

Creating a "Hello World" Program

As is customary when learning a new programming language, our first Rust program will be the classic "Hello World!" To initialize the project, execute the following command in your terminal:

cargo new helloworld

Cargo, which comes bundled with Rust, serves as its package manager, much like NPM for JavaScript and pip for Python.

Next, let's explore the newly created helloworld directory. It contains a Cargo.toml file alongside a src folder housing our source file main.rs. The Cargo.toml file functions similarly to Go's mod file or Python's setup.py, containing crucial package information and dependencies.

The src/main.rs file is quite simple; it serves as our program's entry point, featuring the fn, which denotes a function in Rust. To execute our program, navigate to the helloworld directory and run:

cd helloworld && cargo run

Alternatively, you can compile the project using:

cargo build

This will create a target folder, which contains a debug subfolder where you'll find an executable file named helloworld that you can run directly.

At this point, everything is in place, and we are ready to delve deeper into the world of Rust.

Thanks for reading!