🦀 What Can You Do with Rust?

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is install Rust and it cannot be easier.

Visit the https://rustup.rs/ web to download the official toolchain installer.

It’s similar to the nvm project that is commonly used with JavaScript.

Then you are gonna need some libraries so don’t start from scratch. In the same way, as we have Node packages in JavaScript we are gonna deal with crates in Rust. You can visit crates.io, the official crates registry, to know more about Rust crates.

Are we Rust __ yet?

Since Rust is very versatile there are a lot of topics where Rust can be used and the community is tracking them with different websites, each one with its mission:

• www.arewewebyet.org: Web frameworks both low or high-level
• www.arewegameyet.com: Building a game engine with Rust will enhance the speed and the safety of virtual worlds.
• www.arewelearningyet.com: Another topic that is widely popular right now is machine learning. The Rust ecosystem isn’t very complete right now and it may not be as good as Python right now to do machine learning but If you are interested in the topic you should check this website!

What FANG companies are building with Rust?

• Mozilla: built its new browser engine called Servo.
• Figma: their real-time multiplayer syncing server (used to edit all Figma documents) is written in Rust.
• Sentry: JavaScript, Java and iOS event processing and the command-line client for the Sentry API.
• Atlassian: they use Rust in service for analyzing petabytes of source code.
• Dropbox: they are optimizing cloud file-storage.
• Cloudflare: built Wrangler a manager and CLI to manage its web workers.
• NPM: they replaced and rewrote performance-critical bottlenecks.

You can look at and updates the list of the companies using Rust here: https://www.rust-lang.org/production/users

Rust Jobs

You can look at many Rust jobs, event if they are still rare you can find them in many job listing online like the followings:

• https://hnhiring.com/technologies/rust
• https://rustjobs.rs

Rust in the Web

Finally, if you are doing web development you are lucky!

You can create programs, compile them and use it all together with your existing JavaScript code. The technology that made this possible is WebAssembly and it can be used right now in all modern browsers.

If you want to learn on Rust you can read the official Rust and WebAssembly book.

“ I really love rust ! There are so many constraints from the compiler like its my birthday. “ — from Rust official forum

This was the continuation of another introductive article of Rust for web developer always here on The Startup: https://medium.com/swlh/what-is-rust