1 Why Rust?
This chapter covers:
- The tooling which comes bundled with a standard Rust installation
- A first glimpse of the Rust compiler and what makes it so unique
- What is needed to write web services in Rust
- Features which support the maintainability of Rust applications
Rust offers performance (it has no runtime nor garbage collection), safety (the compiler makes sure everything is memory-safe, even in asynchronous environments) and productivity (its built-in tooling around testing, documentation and the package manager makes it a breeze to build and maintain).
Rust is a systems programming language, which means it uses a compiler to create a binary, which your operating system can run. So instead of a high-level like JavaScript or Ruby, Rust has a compiler like Go, C or Swift. It combines no active runtime (from C) but offers language ergonomics known from Python and Ruby. This is all possible due to the compiler which safeguards any application and makes sure you don’t have any memory issues before you run your application.
You might have heard about Rust, but after trying to go through the tutorials given up on it. Rust comes up as the most-loved programming language on the yearly StackOverflow surveys, and found a larger following in corporations like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. This book will show you how to get to grips with the basics of Rust and how to build and ship solid web services with it.