Rust Celebrates 10 Years of Stability

Let me start with a brief introduction. Rust is an open-source, modern systems programming language that combines memory safety with high performance. It allows developers to write fast, efficient code without sacrificing reliability.

Rust’s main advantage is its ownership model, which eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as data races and null pointer dereferencing, at compile time without needing a garbage collector. This makes it particularly attractive for performance-critical applications like operating systems, game engines, web browsers, etc.

Its origin story is almost legendary at this point. Born from the frustrations of a broken elevator and incubated as a hobby project in the mid-2000s, Rust officially reached version 1.0 on May 15, 2015. Now, ten years later, it has become the go-to choice for developers who need performance and reliability without compromising safety.

The reason it happened is pretty curious. It all started back in 2006 when Graydon Hoare, a software developer at Mozilla, came home from work only to find himself trudging up 21 flights of stairs—because, once again, the elevator was down. The culprit? Repeated software crashes.

That frustrating climb sparked an idea: What if there were a programming language designed from the ground up to prevent exactly these kinds of reliability issues? And just like that, the seeds of Rust were planted—born out of a real-world need for more dependable software.

In its early stages, Mozilla officially backed the project in 2009, laying the groundwork for what would become one of the most respected programming languages nowadays. But Mozilla was only the beginning. Since its first stable release in May 2015, Rust has steadily gained traction across the tech world, earning the trust of major players like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

And for good reason. Before Rust, developers were forced to choose between performance and safety. Legacy languages like C and C++ offered raw speed but were notoriously error-prone, especially in multithreaded environments. With its ownership model and compile-time safety checks, Rust entered the scene as a long-overdue remedy.

Of course, I won’t fail to mention Linux. In a historic move, after Linus Torvalds expressed his support for Rust, a pull request to accept it for Linux was approved in October 2022, making Rust the first programming language besides C and assembly to be supported for Linux kernel development.

Currently, Rust holds about 3% of the global programming language market, so it’s already ranked among the top 10 most-used ones. And while 3% might not sound like a huge number, one thing’s clear—with its avalanche of popularity and widespread adoption, Rust is well on its way to becoming the go-to option for systems programming. Honestly, it wouldn’t be surprising at all.

To round out the celebration of Rust’s tenth anniversary, it’s also worth mentioning that version 1.87 was released today. A coincidence? Not at all. Check it out here for all the details.

Lastly, on a personal note, I’d like to take a moment to express my heartfelt congratulations to everyone who has contributed to making Rust what it is today. Here’s to Rust’s incredible first decade—may the next ten years bring even more growth, innovation, and impact across the world of technology. Happy 10th anniversary, Rust! Keep thriving.