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I've discovered some people aren't aware of why Rust is a really cool programming language. They think it's just a strongly typed compiled language of some sort, which is true, but it doesn't really explain why it is interesting. 1/
Rust doesn't have a garbage collector, but the advanced type system checks to make sure that memory and other resources aren't misused. This is nearly unique in production programming languages. 2/
It is even safe to share bits of memory on the stack in multithreaded code, because the type system will make sure you didn't make any mistakes leading to concurrency errors. This is _very_ useful, and _very_ unusual. 3/
Rust also provides quite advanced constructs, like good support for ad hoc polymorphism (aka "generics" and the like), and has ML style type and pattern matching features that provide high programmer productivity. 4/
While providing these unusually advanced safety and type system features, Rust also is more or less in the performance class of C and C++, languages with "zero overhead abstractions". You pay a bit for abstractions at compile time, but not at run time. 5/
I mention all this because many of my systems programming chums seem to see it as another language in a continuum of recent "advanced" programming languages, like Go for example. It's not. It's quite different, and dare I say stands out from the crowd. 6/
As I've said in the past, if you really need high performance or have low latency requirements, and think you need C or C++, you should probably use Rust instead. 7/7
