How Rust went from a side project to the world's most-loved programming language — MIT Technology Review

Claims

1. adoption-reasons-perf-safety
   AWS described Rust as uniquely positioned to provide advantages not available in other languages, offering 'multiple superpowers in one language.'

   ""Rust is uniquely positioned to give advantages there that I can't get from other languages. It gives you multiple superpowers in one language," says Shane Miller, who created a Rust team at AWS before leaving the firm last year."

   Quote language: en
2. competitive-with-c-speed-energy
   A study of Rust-based code found it runs so efficiently that it uses half as much electricity as a similar program written in Java.

   "a study of Rust-based code found it runs so efficiently that it uses half as much electricity as a similar program written in Java"

   Quote language: en
3. elevator-crash-trigger
   The immediate trigger for Graydon Hoare creating Rust in 2006 was a broken elevator in his apartment building whose software had crashed.

   "Returning home to his apartment in Vancouver, he found that the elevator was out of order; its software had crashed. This wasn't the first time it had happened, either."

   Quote language: en
4. gc-removed-by-2013
   Rust's garbage collector was removed by 2013, after which programs written in Rust ran faster with no periodic halts for memory cleanup.

   "As the team improved the memory-management system, Rust had increasingly little need for its own garbage collector—and by 2013, the team had removed it. Programs written in Rust would now run even faster: no periodic halts while the computer performed cleanup."

   Quote language: en
5. ownership-system-by-2010
   Through the early 2010s, the Rust team created an "ownership" system so that a piece of data can be referred to by only one variable, greatly reducing the chances of memory problems.

   "Through the early 2010s, Mozilla engineers and Rust volunteers worldwide gradually honed Rust's core—the way it is designed to manage memory. They created an "ownership" system so that a piece of data can be referred to by only one variable; this greatly reduces the chances of memory problems."

   Quote language: en
6. rust-fungi-name
   Graydon Hoare named Rust after the rust fungi, describing them as 'over-engineered for survival.'

   "He named it Rust, after a group of remarkably hardy fungi that are, he says, "over-engineered for survival.""

   Quote language: en
7. technology-from-the-past
   The Rust developers described their approach as drawing on established but underutilized programming language research, calling it 'mostly decades-old research.'

   "Many of the tricks Rust employed weren't new ideas: "They're mostly decades-old research," says Manish Goregaokar, who runs Rust's developer-tools team and worked for Mozilla in those early years. But the Rust engineers were adept at finding these well-honed concepts and turning them into practical, usable features."

   Quote language: en