Learning Rust Ebook

Rust is a multi-paradigm, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Rust emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency. Rust enforces memory safety—that is, that all references point to valid memory—without requiring the use of a garbage collector or reference counting present in other memory-safe languages.

To simultaneously enforce memory safety and prevent concurrent data races, Rust’s “borrow checker” tracks the object lifetime of all references in a program during compilation. Rust is popular for systems programming but also offers high-level features including some functional programming constructs.

Software developer Graydon Hoare created Rust as a personal project while working at Mozilla Research in 2006. Mozilla officially sponsored the project in 2009. Since the first stable release in May 2015, Rust has been adopted by companies including Amazon, Discord, Dropbox, Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft.

Rust has been noted for its growth as a newer language and has been the subject of academic programming language research. In 2022, Rust became the third programming language used in the Linux kernel, after C and Assembly language.