The Rust programming language continues to grow in popularity and has been voted Stack Overflow's "most loved" language by developers five years in a row. We like it too. It's a fast, safe and expressive language that is increasing in utility as its ecosystem grows. For example, Rust is starting to be used for data science and machine learning and can give a significant performance boost. Also, Materialize is a streaming-oriented, low-latency database written in Rust.
Rust is continuously gaining in popularity. We've had heated discussions about which is better, Rust or C++/Go, without a clear winner. However, we're glad to see Rust has improved significantly, with more built-in APIs being added and stabilized, including advanced async support, since we mentioned it in our previous Radar. In addition, Rust has also inspired the design of new languages. For example, the Move language on Libra borrows Rust's way of managing memory to manage resources, ensuring that digital assets can never be copied or implicitly discarded.
Since we last featured it on the Radar in January 2015, we've seen steadily increasing interest in Rust. Some of our clients are now using Rust, mostly in the context of infrastructure tooling but also in high-powered embedded devices. Interest was fuelled by a growing ecosystem as well as improvements to the language itself. The latter included straightforward performance improvements but also changes that make Rust more intuitive, for example the change to non-lexical scoping. Most of the significant changes are included in the Rust 2018 standard released last December.
Rust is a system programming language with modern affordances. It features a rich typing system, safe memory model and task-based concurrency. Compared to the Go language, Rust is more friendly to people who would like to write code in a functional style.
