Before jumping into the rust programming language you have to know about programming and programming languages. As Information technology is growing day by day and introducing modern programming languages. The programming language is rich in libraries that help the user to make their work easier and more accurate. There is no need to make a particular library first for coding, millions of libraries are built-in in these types of programming languages. Before going to ‘History of Rust Programming Language’, we need to know what is programming languages.
1. Introduction to Programming Languages
Programming is defined as “a series of well-defined instructions supplied to the computer to solve a specific solution after processing the inputs.” It is the key phrase in the information technology industry. Multiple instructions are created in programming to communicate with computers and force them to carry out these instructions in accordance with predetermined procedures. A computer communicates its own language because it is an electronic device. Like human language, there are many other computer languages as well, including JAVA, Python, C-Sharp, C++, and C. Every language has a unique method of computer teaching.
To answer the question history of rust programming, we need to define what is programming language and how it started. In 1883 the first programming language was developed by two familiar personalities, Ada Lovelace and the father of the computer Charles Babbage Categorically Web programming is one of the many subcategories that programming is further divided into .Net Programming Android apps, Unity, and desktop applications. All of these categories demanded that programmers possess the necessary expertise. These categories require a specific programming language or are based on a specific programming language for the specific field-based programmer. For example, web programming is primarily based on JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, Angular, and Objective C programming languages, while desktop application development uses JAVA, C#, C++, Python, and Lua.
2. History of Rust Programming Language (Origin)
Rust programming language was initially started in the early 20s, and some of the authors write it was first developed as an individual project in 2006. The person who developed it as a personal project was an employee of Mozilla company and his name is Graydon Hoare. After some years in 2009, the company Mozilla started to sponsor this project. After some successful development and additions in 2010, this project was officially announced by the Mozilla company.
Just after the successful opening of the rust programming language, a huge revolution was raised in the compilers. All the compilers who were working on the initial compilation methods written in OCaml transferred to self-hosting compilers. These compilers are based on LLVM written in the rust programming language.
In the very next year 2011, The modern Rust-based compiler was introduced successfully. After compiling itself in 2011, it was named RUSTC. The first version of the rust compiler was a pre-Alpha version name Rust0.1 and was successfully released at just starting of 2012.
2. Evolution of Rust Programming Language (2013- 2019)
To understand the history of Rust programming language, we also need to get to know about its version. Rust programming language has introduced four versions respectively. These versions’ details are as follows:
- Rust0.1
- Rust0.2
- Rust0.3
- Rust0.4
- Rust0.1
The first alpha version 0.1 of the Rust compiler has been made available by Mozilla Labs and the Rust community after more than five years of development. The parallelism and memory safety features of the Rust language are prioritized, and if everything goes according to plan, it will eventually displace C++ as Mozilla’s preferred compiled language. Rust-programmed browser prototypes will ultimately appear, and one-day Firefox or portions of Firefox may be rewritten in Rust.
- Rust0.2
In Rust0.2 Mozilla decided to improve several actions and parameters and also added some new functions and libraries. The following point are defining improvements and the latest included features.
- Local variables and parameter names type hints.
- improved navigation using type or trait-based implementation search.
- Build a project in IDEA with Ctrl+F9.based on a trait, be able to populate an impl type and function.
- The ability to move syntactic elements up, down, left, right, and diagonally (Ctrl+Shift+Right, Left).
- Definition in a hurry (Ctrl+Shift+I).
- Semantic highlighting and highlighting of function exit points.
- Help with typing: join lines (Ctrl+Shift+J) clean up the commas in lines 19 and 15 and adds the semicolon after the return in unit-returning functions. Completion for function calls inserts the parenthesis.
- Breadcrumbs.
- Macro definitions’ completion and navigation.
- (Ctrl+Alt+V) Introduce the variable.
- New inspections and intentions are numerous.
- Rust0.3
In the third version of the rust programming language there are several updates and also added some libraries.
- New programming techniques such as documentation comments and compact closure syntax.
- Semantic cleanup is like extensive work with region pointers.
- Experiment-based new language features such as Fixed-size, interior-allocated vectors, and slices.
- Advancement In compiler recognization
- Added new libraries such as a new time function.
- Tools improvements.
- Rust0.4
A full-Scale Adoption of Borrowed Pointers in Rust 0.4, Authored by Kay Ewbank Wednesday, November 07, 2012. In order to improve the syntax of Mozilla’s Rust programming language, a new version has been made available. Argument modes have been eliminated in the new version, which also fully integrates borrowed pointers.
In early 2014, the head of the Mozilla corporation commented that rust has a huge chance to become a massive competitor of the other programming languages and also c++. But it was just a dream for him because multiple advanced languages were also been introduced and the technology shifted to the next level. Later the chief editor of the company Mr. Binstock also admitted that due to too much variation in the version of the rust programming language its adoption went down. In 2015 the first main version announced rust programming language named Rust 1.0.
3. Rust Developing Authorities and Mozilla Company (2020-present)
The covid-19 pandemic caused the Mozilla company to restrict their corporate worldwide and also laid off more than 250 employees around the world due to the shortage and downfall of the company. Multiple teams were working for different software ware also laid off such as servo team behind the browser was disbanded which was written in Rust programming language.
However the rust development future was the concerned topic, some of the members of the rust team and the core staff kept contributing and their first concern was to take ownership of all trademarks and domain names for financial contributions.
In early 2021 the rust team or the foundation supported five companies such as Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Some of the bloggers also wrote in their blogs that google is also going to announce Rust support within the android open source project as an alternative to the other programming languages such as C/C++.
A survey was conducted in early 2022 according to the stack overflow, 9% of the developer have recently done the development with rust. As the python language is growing in the development area by providing remarkable functionalities, Rust is also tied with the PYTHON programming language in 2022.
According to a survey on Wikipedia, 18% of the python user are not currently using the technology with python because rust programming is a lost programming language because it has seen many ups and down throughout the past 20 years. By supporting these giant companies it will not be wrong to say that the rust programming language will be the biggest competitor among the contributive language such as C, C++, Objective C, and so on.
After understanding the computer programming languages and the history of rust programming language, we also need to understand what is rust programming language. The following headings are describing rust programming language and why it is famous in the development of Information technology.
4. What is Rust Programming?
The developer gave the computer language Rust its name after a particular kind of fungus called Rust. The open-source Rust programming language is protected by either the MIT or Apache 2.0 license. On July 7, 2010, the Rust programming language’s initial version was formally released. Version 1.52.1 of the Rust programming language, which was released on May 10th, 2021, is the most recent version.
Rust was first developed to address issues with C/C++, but due to how well it performed, both large and small businesses, including Dropbox, Firefox, Cloudflare, and many others, now use it. A multi-paradigm, statically typed, high-performance programming language is called Rust. with a primary emphasis on performance and safety. This language aids programmers in building reliable and secure applications. Rust already provides solutions to the memory faults and concurrent programming issues that C/C++ still faces.
Rust is favored by hundreds of companies all over the world because of its many benefits. It is quick and more memory efficient than other programming languages. The language can provide many performance functions, integrate with other languages, and run on embedded devices without the use of a runtime or garbage collector. Rust programming language also provides some extraordinary features which make them compete with their rival programming languages. Following are some features to facilitate the user in their concerned development.
5. Core Features of Rust programming languages.
A generic level of the rust programming language and a bit history was previously described. Now, we are going to explore the core features of the rust programming language. The purpose of exploring these core features of the rust programming language is that these features will actually reflect the performance of the programming language. These features will show how the rust programming language is reliable. How are the ways that are more efficient than the other languages? And why the rust programming so popular from the development perspective?
- The clarity in Error Messages
The rust programming facilitates the user by displaying the error messages in proper formatting and colorful ways and also provides auto-correct suggestions for enhancing reliability. The step is further from the other compilers such as (the GNU compiler collection).
- Pattern Recognition Efficiencies
A specialized method for finding specific traits in a tried-and-true “match” expression is pattern matching. This feature, which enables more control over the program’s flow, is available in the Rust language. between the combinations of patterns are variables, placeholders, and literals. The pattern recognition technique is more competitive and smart than the other programming languages.
- Semantics Movements
Move semantics is a feature of Rust. A move operation can quickly take the place of a copy operation. By default, the language is moving. The old object is then no longer present after it copies the bytes to the new location. This helps the user to perform their required work in a short time.
- Manual Memory Management
Rust has manual memory management, in contrast to C. Memory allocation is managed by a programmer. Rust employs smart pointers, an abstract data type, to track the location of an object and clean it up with one operator.
- Time Efficiency for Development
Rust was developed to cut down on the amount of time needed to develop software. Since it doesn’t demand that a coder. The language aims to be abstraction-free to make development simpler and faster because it doesn’t demand that a programmer be bogged down in numerous details, which slows down the process.
- Suitable Bindings with programing language C.
The Rust programming language can communicate with the C language thanks to bindings to C libraries. It makes it possible for the language to interact with the C APIs, enhancing its own system and ensuring memory safety.
- Cost-Free Abstraction
Rust doesn’t have any additional runtime overhead. Simply expressed, the cost will be the same whether you use the abstraction or the “manual” implementation. Additionally, adding abstractions won’t have an impact on the code’s runtime performance. On the contrary, it makes the code better and easier to read.
- Secure Storage Area
Rust ensures memory safety by utilizing the idea of ownership. In a nutshell, ownership is something that sits between the garbage collector and the memory controller. Variables can use other variables’ memory, this technique provides an effective positive point to the language. It provides memory protection without placing an undue burden on the garbage collector. Rust supports up to 50 MB of storage.