Step-by-step articles on Rust, part of our Systems Languages collection.
Showing 10 articles
Rust is a compiled language that gives you C-level performance with memory safety guaranteed by the compiler, without a garbage collector. It powers parts of web browsers, operating systems, cloud infrastructure and a growing share of developer tooling. Where...
Ownership is the idea that makes Rust memory-safe without a garbage collector. It comes down to three rules and two kinds of references. The three ownership rules Each value has exactly one owner (a variable). When the owner goes out of scope, the value is dro...
Rust has no exceptions. Functions that can fail return Result<T, E> , and the compiler makes sure you deal with the error case. Result and match use std::fs; match fs::read_to_string("config.toml") { Ok(text) => println!("{} bytes", text.len()), Err(e) => epri...
Rust's enums are far more powerful than enums in most languages: each variant can hold its own data. Combined with match , they let you model states so that invalid ones can't exist. Structs and impl #[derive(Debug, Clone)] struct User { id: u64, name: String,...
A trait defines behaviour that types can implement, similar to an interface. Generics let functions work with any type that implements the traits they need. Defining and implementing a trait trait Notifier { fn send(&self, to: &str, message: &str) -> Result<()...
Async Rust lets one thread handle thousands of network connections. Rust provides async / await syntax; a runtime such as Tokio actually runs the futures. Setup [dependencies] tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] } reqwest = { version = "0.12", feature...
Axum is a popular Rust web framework from the Tokio team. Handlers are plain async functions, and "extractors" in their parameters pull data out of the request in a type-safe way. Dependencies [dependencies] axum = "0.8" tokio = { version = "1", features = ["f...
Cargo is Rust's build tool and package manager. It's one of the best parts of the language, and a few features make a big difference in real projects. Everyday commands cargo new myapp # binary project (--lib for a library) cargo add serde --features derive ca...
Iterators are how idiomatic Rust processes collections. They read like a pipeline and compile down to code as fast as a hand-written loop. The basics let prices = vec![499, 1299, 250, 3999]; let affordable: Vec<u32> = prices .iter() // borrow each item .filter...
Rust evolves in small releases every six weeks, plus occasional editions that bundle changes which would otherwise break existing code. The 2024 edition shipped with Rust 1.85 in early 2025. Editions don't split the ecosystem Each crate picks its edition in Ca...
