Rust is a systems programming language that, in the words of its 1.0 announcement, aims “to make it easier to build reliable, efficient systems” by combining “low-level control over performance with high-level convenience and safety guarantees.” It reached its 1.0 milestone on May 15, 2015, after years of development sponsored by Mozilla.
Rust’s defining characteristic is that it achieves memory safety without a garbage collector or runtime. The official site describes it as “blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector,” able to “power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages.” The 1.0 announcement notes this makes it possible to use Rust libraries as a “drop-in replacement” for C.
The mechanism behind these guarantees is Rust’s type system and ownership model. As the official site puts it, “Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — enabling you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.” The 1.0 release also marked a stability commitment, after which breaking changes were largely out of scope.
Created by Graydon Hoare as a personal project and later backed by Mozilla, Rust has since grown well beyond its origins into a widely adopted language for systems and infrastructure work.