by:  Jerry Rice

Although twelve+ years since its inception at Mozilla, primarily in the past five or so years Rust has gained significant momentum and interest within a wider community of academics, researchers and commercial enterprises. In fact, several notable large enterprises including Microsoft and Amazon have expressed public interest in the development language in the past two years.

The Rust language holds promise as a potential future successor to 'c' for systems and embedded programming efforts, a role which 'c' has occupied for the past forty years. A potential hiccup to this evolutionary trajectory is that in August 2020 (midst of pandemic) Mozilla laid off a fair number of their Rust development team.

Currently there is only a single Rust compiler which is based on LLVM and supports multiple targets. The compiler is maintained by the Rust open source community. For the language to gain critical mass one would foresee additional alternative compilers to be supported - but this is unclear in early 2021.

Start: Saturday, February 6, 2021

Url: www.rust-lang.org/

Category: Science & Technology, Software