Rust programming language

• Pavel Tišnovský, Red Hat
  • ptisnovs@redhat.com
• Presentation:
  • https://tisnik.github.io/presentations/summer_camp_2021/rust.html
• Presentation source:
  • https://github.com/tisnik/presentations/blob/master/docs/summer_camp_2021/rust.md

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Table of content

• Requirements to production-ready programming language
• Rust popularity and expansion
• Rust characteristics
• Rust versus C/C++
• Rust versus Go
• Communication with compiler
• Data types
• Other interesting parts of Rust
• Object oriented programming in Rust
• Memory management
• Threads
• Testing
• Package manager (Cargo)
• Selected useful packages
• Deployment
• Interface to Python
• Documentation

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Requirements to production-ready programming language

• Program correctness
• Maintainability
• Safety
• Stability of language ecosystem
• Enough developers
• Resource requirements
  • More RAM needed -> more expenses in containerized world
• API and ability to communicate with (micro)services

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Rust popularity and expansion

Popularity of Rust

• More metrics how to measure popularity
  • Tiobe index
  • PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Languages)
  • OpenHub (for registered repositories only)
  • StackOverflow (yearly interrogatory)

Rust expansion

• Again, many statistic available
  • should we trust them?

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Rust characteristics

• Goals
  • safe applications
  • parallelization/concurrency
  • performance comparable with C and C++ (even for new features)
  • https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/rust.html
  • good compiler messages
  • low level and at the same time high level features
• Don’t repeat the same mistakes made in C/C++ and in Java
  • macrosystem
  • pointers
  • NPE
  • strings

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Rust characteristics

• Multiple paradigms supported
  • Imperative
  • Functional
  • some OOP-like properties (but not class-based language)
• Available for all “interesting” platforms
  • Linux
  • (Free)BSD
  • OS X
  • Windows
• Supported by many CPU architectures
  • i686, x86-64, ARMv6/v7 (32), AArch64, MIPS, PowerPC, S390
  • RISC-V
  • Bare Cortex-M0, M0+, M1, M4(F), M7(F) bare = w/o OS, core library only
  • (even for MSP430 - 16bit MCU!)
  • Platform Support (1)
  • Platform Support (2)
• Now based on LLVM backend
  • Space for more optimizations (WebAssembly via Emscripten or directly)
  • https://www.rust-lang.org/what/wasm
• More info
  • Object-Orientation in Rust