{"id":8138,"date":"2021-10-03T09:39:31","date_gmt":"2021-10-03T09:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TheNextWeb=1368742"},"modified":"2021-10-03T09:39:31","modified_gmt":"2021-10-03T09:39:31","slug":"thought-you-loved-python-wait-until-you-meet-rust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=8138","title":{"rendered":"Thought you loved Python? Wait until you meet Rust"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cTechnology from the past comes to save the future from itself.\u201d That\u2019s how Graydon Hoare, the creator of Rust, describes what he wants to achieve<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the key hallmarks of Rust: using technologies that are well-known to academia but rarely implemented in contemporary programming languages. Technologies that are old, reliable, and sometimes forgotten. But which, above all, work extremely well.<\/p>\n

These technologies are used mainly for one thing: safety.<\/p>\n

Sounds boring? It is not, if you ask the community. A whopping 87 percent of Rust developers love this language<\/a> above all others, making it the most-loved language since 2016 according to this year\u2019s StackOverflow developer survey.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think that software developers are among the most innovative humans on this planet. Rust, however, is the exact opposite of the \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d mantra. Nevertheless, Rust developers are almost guaranteed to learn concepts they\u2019ve never heard about before.<\/p>\n

From the novelty of systems programming for some developers over algebraic data types to Rust\u2019s very own approach to memory safety: Every developer can find something new and incredibly useful to learn. And there are more reasons<\/a> to fall in love with Rust.<\/p>\n

More memory safety without garbage collection<\/h2>\n

One challenge of every programming language is managing a computer\u2019s memory in a safe and efficient way. Python, for example, has a garbage collector that constantly looks out for no longer used memory and cleans it up while the program runs.<\/p>\n

In other languages, like C and C++, the programmer must explicitly allocate and free memory as they go. Since all memory-related problems are therefore cleared before the program runs, this approach is much better for optimizing performance.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, memory is yet another thing that developers need to think about all the time. This is one of the reasons why it takes much longer to write a program in C than in Python, even if it does the same thing at the end of the day.<\/p>\n

Rust goes an alternative way: Memory is allocated through a system of ownership at compile time. It\u2019s a neat hack to ensure that unused data is being cleaned without forcing the programmer to think about allocating and freeing memory all the time.<\/p>\n

Basically, ownership is a collection of three <\/span>rules<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Each value in Rust has a variable called owner.<\/li>\n
  2. There can only be one owner at a time.<\/li>\n
  3. When the owner goes out of scope, the value will be dropped, thus freeing memory.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A simple example is assigning a vector in Rust:<\/span><\/p>\n