Rust is the language of the future. With the growth and potential of crypto, as well as its reliance on the blockchain, Rust is the next language to learn to set yourself apart as a seriously useful developer. Called a “perfect” language by Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder and Blockchain guru), Rust is setting itself up to be the future of blockchain interoperability.
What Is Rust?
Focussed on speed and memory safety, Rust’s parallelism gives this open-source code a serious advantage. With wide-ranging capabilities, Rust is used for everything from game engines to file systems. It’s becoming increasingly popular for blockchain creation because of the safety inherently worked into the language.
Why Is Rust Popular?
The popularity of Rust on Stack Overflow has boomed in recent years. Stack Overflow is the hub for programmers, so this enthusiasm represents an accurate picture of the enthusiasm for this language. This language grew 234% in one year, showing that it’s expanding and developing at lightning speed.
This is compounded by Rust’s adoption into the coding practices of industry titans including:
- Mozilla
- Microsoft
- Huawei
- Amazon Web Services
- Dropbox
- Cloudflare
Another component is the shift toward blockchain. Blockchain is a system of recording information. This system makes it very difficult to hack, duplicate, or otherwise change the information held within. This makes it immensely useful in financial transactions. As online transactions soar (in 2020, consumers spent over $870.78 billion online with U.S. merchants), security is paramount.
What Makes Rust a Strong Language?
Rust is a high-level language syntax-wise while offering the control and performance of low-level language. It is the answer to the holes left by C and C++. While the latter two languages are excellent high-performance languages, they lack safety. Rust emphasizes safety while still ensuring high performance. This is critical for blockchain services that need to be rendered impervious to attacks. While Rust does have a steep learning curve, the safety and speed it offers may be unparalleled, which makes it a lynchpin in future services.
By piggy-backing off the efficacy of C++, developer Grayson Hoare was able to integrate friendlier syntax when he created Rust in 2006. While working at Mozilla, he also infused this language with tools for simplifying development and focusing on safety. This language was created specifically to plug the gaps left by other languages.
The main selling feature of Rust is that it’s safe by default. Memory corruption is not possible by accident because memory access is checked. This makes it the language of choices for blockchain services. Rust strictly enforces safe borrowing of data while selecting, destructuring, aggregating, and operating on data.
Significance to Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency (also called crypto) has blown into the mainstream limelight recently. As more people turn to crypto, programming languages are also becoming more popular. Rust is among these, because its significance to the blockchain, and therefore to crypto, is so great.
Rust is used by alts like Polkadot and Solana, showing its intrinsic flexibility and capacity for interoperability. Polkadot is a multi-chain application environment, and Solana is a blockchain platform with smart contract functionality. Both are written with Rust, showing the possibilities for a language like Rust.
Should I Learn Rust?
Crypto is growing steadily and rapidly. Currently, there is a shortage of blockchain developers. Rust is making itself known in the programming world. Its built-in safety allows for stronger security from the beginning. Developers who learn Rust and make themselves masters of this multi-tool language will make themselves a hot commodity in blockchain and crypto.
By becoming proficient in Rust early, you open your skills to an ever-widening network of platforms that are and will be reliant on the language.