It’s not new that Internet of Things devices are changing the world we are in. They’ve made their way into our daily activities both in the form of more vital examples, like intelligent coffee machines, up to promoting critical infrastructures, like farming and manufacturing tools. This new level of connectivity has dramatically improved our control over our environment and industry. These devices are at the heart of the latest technological trends like Digital Twin and Industry 4.0.

But with any pioneering tech, seeing how we build and use it is an ongoing process. IoT devices practically have far less processing power than a quality computer, which means that how we write code for them needs to be used regarding the constraint. Inefficiencies in processing can significantly limit the performance of devices and the standard of communication with the rest of the network. This is where more optimized programming languages have a key opportunity to improve the potential of our IoT devices. With a small amount offering faster runtime, Rust, in particular, is becoming a fast runner among developer platforms.

In Stack Overflow’s yearly survey, Rust has been voted as the most loved language for five years. It is designed to specialize in speed and memory safety as an open-source programming language. Similar to C++, it addresses security tendencies related to memory errors and concurrency. It’s usually used for applications that need performance and safety, including operating systems, simulation, file systems, and browser components. Its features also make it an excellent choice for distributed systems and IoT devices.

As said, devices with low CPU and memory resources like those in the internet of things may face challenges in terms of performance. While C and C++ do well in building firm application performance, developers are used to the commonality of bugs that can occur in memory management. Another major requirement is developer productivity, where coding for advanced distributed systems can lead to long development cycles.

In terms of performance, Rust flourishes in speed memory efficiency. By not having a garbage collector improves performance-critical services and integrates with other languages easily. Rust also offers automatic memory management through its sound ownership system, which makes garbage collection not needed.

However, Rust’s functions make it a great language for productivity. Rust is simple, has great documentation, a friendly compiler, and smart editor support equipment providing auto-completion and type inspections. To help developers when the Rust community created programming in Rust, the auto-completion equipment and code analyzers.

Thus, zero-cost abstractions ensure practically no runtime overhead for the abstractions you use, so you only pay for what you use. It also has various ‘modern’ language conveniences, like a proper package manager and assisting language conveniences.

The potential of Rust in IoT development is easily gaining traction in the computing industry. In 2019, 42 Technology pronounced the world’s first Rust application for a single-chip Internet of Things (IoT) device. Projects such as these are speeding the use of Rust and continually developing the equipment available for IoT developers. Also, compute sites built on Rust take advantage of its huge benefits at a foundational level, making them a good source of distributed IoT development and application.