Should we call Rust a Failed Programming Language? (2024)

  • Last Updated: September 30, 2022
  • In AI Mysteries

Rust has been ranked as the most liked language by its users for two years in surveys but programmers say otherwise

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Should we call Rust a Failed Programming Language? (1)

  • byTasmia Ansari
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Google engineers recently introduced ‘Carbon’, an open source programming language hailed as the possible successor of C++. With the new ‘experimental’ language being the talk of the internet, conversations around why ‘Rust’ didn’t become the official successor of C++ have also surfaced.

With its own community of people called ‘Rustaceans’ who use, contribute and are interested in the development of the language, Rust is a statically-typed programming language for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency and memory management. Its syntax is similar to that of C++. The open-source project was originally developed at Mozilla Research. In 2021, the Rust Foundation took the torch and drove the development of the language.

In his presentation at CPP North, Google engineer Chandler Carruth advised those using ‘Rust’ to continue using it. Carbon is for developers with large codebases in C++, which are difficult to convert into Rust. Carbon is specifically what Carruth called a ‘successor language’, built atop an already existing ecosystem, C++ in this case.

According to a StackOverflow survey, Rust is considered to be one of the fastest-growing programming languages and has been ranked as the most liked language by its users. But, programmers say otherwise.

A good language should be safe, fast and easy to program. But is Rust?

Rust is difficult. It has a complex syntax and a steep learning curve. It is designed to uniquely solve some very challenging problems in programming. However, as a beginner, using Cuda or MPI on Rust is not very simple compared to the other options like Swift and Go. Moreover, it is slow. Rust is a snail compared to other languages. Even for small projects, the compile times are painfully long, and runtime measurements show that Rust is less efficient than the C programs.
Imagine rewriting C libraries that have had decades of scrutiny applied only to introduce new bugs. Bugs in code are programmers’ nightmare. While it does save developers from some mistakes, it does not stop them from unintentionally writing bugs. Another issue are the constant warnings appearing over parentheses, especially over if statements and while loops.

Rust is therefore a lot more complicated and inefficient and may soon be superseded by said tooling.

Not so unpopular after all?

Even though first-hand experiences tell a different story, most big techs are already using Rust, while others plan to do so. Recently, Rust joined Meta’s panel of officially supported server-side programming languages. The list previously included C++, Hack and Python.

“There’s a rapidly increasing Rust footprint in our products and services, and we’re committing to Rust long-term and welcome early adopters”, says Eric Garcia, a Meta software engineering manager.

Dropbox uses Rust for some mission-critical bits of its programming. Other internet companies would probably choose Rust when they need good security, multi-threading, and to reduce the amount of hardware. For example, a highly efficient web service written in Rust can save millions of dollars in hardware for a company running thousands of servers.

Google also plans to use Rust in the Linux kernel after bringing support for the systems programming language Rust to Android. To reiterate, the aim is to reduce security flaws. Meanwhile, Microsoft too has turned to Rust to reduce memory-related bugs in Windows components. Currently, there are 25 repositories on GitHub of the public work Microsoft is doing with Rust. Most of them have occasional commits, which is minuscule compared to 317 C++ repositories.

Facebook has also strengthened ties with Rust by joining the Rust Foundation, an organisation established in 2021 to make Rust “a mainstream language of choice for systems programming and beyond”.

In 2020, Linux kernel developers proposed rewriting new Linux kernel code in Rust. The idea was to add new code in Rust to the originally written Kernel in C. However, this idea is still in the development stage, described as experimental.

In the future, Rust could become a top favourite language for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices with tiny processors and little RAM but need a high level of security. Moreover, considering its relationship with big techs, it would probably become a favourite language for internet companies that need to offer web services to millions of users.

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Should we call Rust a Failed Programming Language? (2024)

FAQs

Is Rust a bad programming language? ›

Rust is not a memory safe language, and does not embody safety practices. There's a lot of work to be done, a lot of the world to be fixed, and I could do away with the noise they make to mask the lack of work.

Is Rust a dead language? ›

Rust is One of the Fastest Growing Programming Languages, According to The IEEE Spectrum Development report by Tiobe Co. There are 2.8 million coders writing in Rust, and companies from Microsoft to Amazon regard it as key to their future.

Why shouldn't you use Rust? ›

Tldr: It's too new. Rust is a promising language, but because it's so recent, you're not very likely to find good libraries or docs. It doesn't have what something like C has, and that's over 50 years of existence.

Is Rust losing popularity? ›

Rust is growing in popularity, but it still has some way to go. The research on Rust's growing popularity as a programming language aligns closely with similar analysis from Stack Overflow's 2023 developer survey.

Which language is better than Rust? ›

Flexibility Python is applicable in many areas of technology. It supports several domains, like web development, machine learning, etc., with many libraries. While Rust is great for system programming, it offers less flexibility than Python.

Can Rust do everything Python can? ›

Rust and Python both have their strengths and are suitable for different parts of data and development projects. Python excels in rapid development, data analysis, and machine learning, while Rust offers performance, safety, and control, making it ideal for systems programming and performance-critical applications.

Why does nobody use Rust? ›

Rust upsets people because Rust's solution to memory safety doesn't require anything particularly modern in terms of theoretical underpinnings.

Why is Rust a big problem? ›

Rust and corrosion can cause significant damage to machinery and equipment; weakening metal structures, causing them to fail and leading to increased repair and replacement costs.

Is Rust outdated? ›

Restricting programmers of what they can or cannot use, Rust doesn't have decent inheritance and exceptions, making it simple yet interfering with the availability of programming paradigms among the programmers. No doubt, Rust's popularity started declining from the year 2018.

Does Tesla use Rust programming language? ›

The most popular programming languages I saw them use were Python, Javascript, Golang, C, C++, Rust, and Java!

Does Rust have any future? ›

Rust also has some plus points when it comes to building ML and AI applications that deal with complex data structures or do efficient memory management. In the Future There Will Be More Libraries And Toolkits Utilized For Rust That Are Intended For Scientific Computation Or Deep Learning Computation.

What percentage of programmers use Rust? ›

Rust at Work

34% of 2023 survey respondents use Rust in the majority of their coding at work — an increase of 5pp from 2022.

What does Linus Torvalds think of Rust? ›

Switching to a more modern topic, the introduction of the Rust language into Linux, Torvalds is disappointed that its adoption isn't going faster. "I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust.

Is Rust a C++ killer? ›

The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust) | Hacker News. [Languages like Rust] do help you to write more features with fewer bugs, but they are not of much help when you need to squeeze the very last flop from the hardware you rent. I do think that Rust helps you squeeze out that last 1% of performance over C++.

Why is Rust code so hard to read? ›

Most of what makes Rust relatively hard is that the compiler is less forgiving of errors than other programming languages, so that a program that Rust accepts is more likely to be correct than a program that simply compiles/runs written in another language.

Is Rust as good as C++? ›

When comparing, Rust performance vs C++ is often cited as being faster because of its unique components. More often than not, their speed depends on the program being developed, the compiler, and the quality of the code.

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