Along with the software technology, hardware technology is also improving at a rapid rate. New hardware technology provides various features like high speed processing CPUs and parallel computing, which considerably improves the execution of applications. To efficiently make use of a new hardware technology, Mozilla announced its development practice for providing its web browser engine Servo with its collaboration with Samsung. Servo is being developed using an advanced programming language called Rust, with its key features like speed, security and concurrency. It will enable the browser to make the best use of advanced features of new hardware technology to improve the user experience.
Initially, Rust was a personal project of one of the Mozilla employees Graydone Hoare in 2006. Later on, Mozilla involved itself in the project in 2009 and stabilized the initial version to match with the features of other programming languages like C, C++ and officially announced it in 2010. Servo is being developed from the scratch using Rust, so it inherits various features like check to security vulnerabilities and efficient memory management, in the web browser itself.
Some of the features of Rust are:
- It is a multi-paradigm programming language i.e. it can support for more than one programming style or methods. A program can be purely procedural or purely object-oriented or a mix of both. Rust can easily support and execute it properly.
- Rust also supports for concurrency in hardware resources so as to make the efficient utilization of different cores of multi-core CPUs available in current and future hardware computing platforms.
- “Type Inference” is yet another powerful feature of Rust which liberates a programmer to define the data type of a variable. The in-built functionality of Rust asks the compiler to decide the data type as soon as the value is assigned to the variable.
- Rust also supports “memory safety” by default unlike conventional programming languages like C and C++. Memory safety helps in checking the entire class of bugs and errors that may cause security vulnerabilities in RAM access. Dangling Pointers and Buffer overflow are some of its popular examples which cause a program to respond abnormally due to memory related errors.
From a developer's perspective, the structure of a Rust program may look similar to those of C or C++ however, syntactically and semantically, Rust is way different than C or C++. Implementing manual security during coding considerably degrades the performance of an application coded in C, C++ etc. On the other hand, Rust provides a better security and highly performance coding, which is better optimized at the runtime and compile time.
Rust can be considered as future of computer programming which encapsulates the features of famous programming languages like C, C++ along with its own features of concurrency, better security.