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Rust (programming language)

General-purpose programming language

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Rust supports multiple programming paradigms. It was influenced by ideas from functional programming, including immutability, higher-order functions, algebraic data types, and pattern matching. It also supports object-oriented programming via structs, enums, traits, and methods. Rust enforces memory safety (i.e., that all references point to valid memory) without a conventional garbage collector; instead, memory safety errors and data races are prevented by the "borrow checker", which tracks the object lifetime of references at compile time.

Software developer Graydon Hoare created Rust in 2006 while working at Mozilla, which officially sponsored the project in 2009. The first stable release, Rust 1.0, was published in May 2015. The project has been sponsored by the Rust Foundation since February 2021.

Rust has been adopted by many software projects, especially web services and system software. It has been studied academically and has a growing community of developers.

History

2006–2009: Early years

In 2006, Rust began as a personal project by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. According to MIT Technology Review, he started the project due to his frustration with a broken elevator in his apartment building whose software had crashed, and named the language after the fungi of the same name that is "over-engineered for survival". Between 2006 and 2009, Rust was not publicized to others at Mozilla and was written in Hoare's free time. Hoare began speaking about the language around 2009 after a small group at Mozilla became interested.

Early contributors have agreed that the language was based primarily on existing ideas. Hoare cited languages from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as influences — including CLU, BETA, Mesa, NIL, Erlang, Newsqueak, Napier, Hermes, Sather, Alef, and Limbo. He described the language as "technology from the past come to save the future from itself." Early contributor Manish Goregaokar similarly described it as based on "mostly decades-old research."

The first compiler was written in about 38,000 lines of OCaml. It supported a number of features no longer present today, including explicit object-oriented programming via an obj keyword and a typestate analysis system tracking variable state such as going from uninitialized to initialized.

2009–2012: Mozilla sponsorship

In 2009, Mozilla officially sponsored the project. Brendan Eich and other executives, intrigued by the possibility of using Rust for a safe web browser engine, placed engineers on the project including Patrick Walton, Niko Matsakis, Felix Klock, and Manish Goregaokar. A conference room taken by the project developers was dubbed "the nerd cave," with a sign placed outside the door.

Work shifted from the OCaml compiler to a self-hosting compiler (i.e., written in Rust) targeting LLVM. The ownership system was in place by 2010. The Rust logo was developed in 2011 based on a bicycle chainring. The early 2010s witnessed increasing involvement from full-time engineers at Mozilla and open source contributors.

On January 20, 2012, Rust 0.1 became the first public release for Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

2012–2015: Evolution

The following years were marked by substantial changes to the Rust type system. Memory management through the ownership system was gradually consolidated and expanded; by 2013, the garbage collector was rarely used, and was removed. Also removed were typestates, the pure keyword, various specialized pointer types, and syntax support for channels.

According to Steve Klabnik, the language was influenced during this period by developers coming from C++ (e.g., low-level performance of features), scripting languages (e.g., Cargo and package management), and functional programming (e.g., the type system).

In 2013, Graydon Hoare stepped down from Rust. After Hoare's departure, it evolved organically under a federated governance structure, with a "core team" of initially six people, and around 30-40 developers total across various other teams. In March 2014, a Request for Comments (RFC) process for new language features was added. By 2016, the core team would grow to nine people with over 1600 RFCs.

Development focused on finalizing features for version 1.0 (which would begin providing backward compatibility). According to Andrew Binstock writing for Dr. Dobb's Journal in January 2014, while Rust was "widely viewed as a remarkably elegant language", adoption slowed because it radically changed from version to version.

On May 15, 2015, Rust 1.0 became the first stable release. One year later, the compiler had accumulated at least 1,400 contributors, and there were at least 5,000 third-party libraries published on the package management website Crates.io.

2015–2020: Servo and early adoption

The development of the Servo browser engine continued in parallel with Rust, funded by Mozilla and Samsung. New features in Rust were tested out by the Servo team, and new features in Servo were used to give feedback back to the Rust team. The first version of Servo was released in 2016. The Firefox web browser shipped with Rust code as of 2016 (version 45), but components of Servo did not appear in Firefox until September 2017 (version 57) as part of the Gecko and Quantum projects.

In the years following 1.0, improvements were made to the toolchain ecosystem including Rustfmt, integrated development environment (IDE) support, and a regular compiler testing and release cycle. Rust's community gained a code of conduct and an IRC chat for discussion.

The earliest known adoption outside of Mozilla was by individual projects at Samsung, Facebook (now Meta Platforms), Dropbox, and Tilde, Inc., the company behind ember.js. Amazon Web Services followed in 2020. Engineers cited performance, lack of a garbage collector, safety, and developer experience as reasons for the adoption. Amazon developers cited a 2017 research finding that Rust code was more energy efficient compared to similar Java code.

2020–present: Mozilla layoffs and Rust Foundation

In August 2020, Mozilla laid off 250 of its 1,000 employees as part of a corporate restructuring during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Servo team was disbanded. The event raised concerns about the future of Rust. The Rust Core Team acknowledged the impact of the layoffs and announced plans for an independent foundation. Its first goal would be to own and take financial responsibility for trademarks and domain names.

On February 8, 2021, the Rust Foundation was formed by founding companies Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla. The foundation would support developers financially through grants and server funding. In an April 6, 2021 blog post, Google announced support for Rust within the Android Open Source Project. Facebook (Meta Platforms) joined the foundation in April 2021, followed by ARM (Arm Holdings) in November.

On November 22, 2021, the Moderation Team, responsible for enforcing the community code of conduct, resigned "in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves". In May 2022, the Rust leadership council published a response to the incident.

The Rust Foundation posted a draft for a new trademark policy on April 6, 2023 that resulted in widespread negative reactions. The trademark policy included rules for how the Rust logo and name could be used.

In June 2026, OpenAI joined the Rust Foundation.

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