Modern Features

Rust is built with all the experience gained in the last 40 years.

Language Features

  • Enums and pattern matching.
  • Generics.
  • No overhead FFI.
  • Zero-cost abstractions.

Tooling

  • Great compiler errors.
  • Built-in dependency manager.
  • Built-in support for testing.
  • Excellent Language Server Protocol support.

Key points:

  • Zero-cost abstractions, similar to C++, means that you don’t have to ‘pay’ for higher-level programming constructs with memory or CPU. For example, writing a loop using for should result in roughly the same low level instructions as using the .iter().fold() construct.

  • It may be worth mentioning that Rust enums are ‘Algebraic Data Types’, also known as ‘sum types’, which allow the type system to express things like Option<T> and Result<T, E>.

  • Remind people to read the errors — many developers have gotten used to ignore lengthy compiler output. The Rust compiler is significantly more talkative than other compilers. It will often provide you with actionable feedback, ready to copy-paste into your code.

  • The Rust standard library is small compared to languages like Java, Python, and Go. Rust does not come with several things you might consider standard and essential:

    • a random number generator, but see rand.
    • support for SSL or TLS, but see rusttls.
    • support for JSON, but see serde_json. The reasoning behind this is that functionality in the standard library cannot go away, so it has to be very stable. For the examples above, the Rust community is still working on finding the best solution — and perhaps there isn’t a single “best solution” for some of these things.

    Rust comes with a built-in package manager in the form of Cargo and this makes it trivial to download and compile third-party crates. A consequence of this is that the standard library can be smaller.

    Discovering good third-party crates can be a problem. Sites like https://lib.rs/ help with this by letting you compare health metrics for crates to find a good and trusted one.

  • rust-analyzer is a well supported LSP implementation used in major IDEs and text editors.