Rust is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language known for its performance, memory safety, and concurrency. Created by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla in 2006 and officially sponsored by Mozilla in 2009, Rust's first stable release was in May 2015. It achieves memory safety without garbage collection through its borrow checker, which tracks object lifetimes at compile time. Rust's syntax shares similarities with C and C++, but its features are influenced by functional programming languages like OCaml.
Rust is designed to empower developers to write high-performance and safe code, making it suitable for systems programming, embedded systems, and web development. It's used in operating systems like Redox and is gaining popularity for embedded systems due to its ability to operate directly on hardware with minimal overhead. Web frameworks like Actix Web and Rocket leverage Rust's performance for scalable web applications. Rust is also used to compile code for WebAssembly, enabling high-performance web applications. The U.S. White House recommended Rust in February 2024 as a memory-safe alternative to C and C++ for software development. According to the Stack Overflow annual Developer Survey, Rust was the most admired programming language of 2025.