2024 Rust Developer Roadmap

In the past five years, Rust has become one of the 15 most popular and beloved programming languages with its incredible development experience and flexibility. It has powerful features, transparent documentation, and a participatory and supportive community of contributors.

Rust prioritizes safety, performance, and concurrency. It allows programmers to use the control of low-level languages to create applications, while also possessing the powerful abstraction of high-level languages. Overall, with Rust, you can do many things, so every developer should at least give it a try.

The core content of this article is as follows:

# 1. Rust Core Features

Below we will explore some core features of Rust

Memory safety:

The main design goal of Rust is to ensure memory safety without relying on the garbage collector. This is achieved through transparent data ownership, a powerful type system, and strict compile-time checks. The data ownership paradigm stipulates that each piece of data in Rust has a unique owner. When ownership is transferred (called “moved”), the previous owner can no longer access the data. This can prevent duplicate release operations and eliminate double deletion errors. This method eliminates a class of errors during the compile phase.

By using the Option < T > type in Rust, errors such as null pointer backreferences that are common in many languages can be eliminated. It explicitly handles the situation where a value may not exist.

Due to Rust’s borrowing and ownership system, it can also prevent data races and buffer overflows. If a piece of code may be unsafe, Rust will not compile it unless it is wrapped in an unsafe block to remind developers to operate with caution.

Concurrency model:

Concurrency in Rust is built on the same principles that provide memory safety: ownership and borrowing. By utilizing these principles, Rust ensures thread safety.

The language provides several concurrency primitives such as Arc (atomic reference counting) for shared state and Mutex or RwLock for mutable access. Channels in Rust provide a way for communication between threads.

The async/await syntax introduced 1.39.0 Rust allows you to write asynchronous code that looks like synchronous code, simplifying complex concurrency scenarios.

Excellent performance:

Rust’s “zero-cost abstraction” means that using advanced constructs does not incur runtime overhead. You can reap the benefits of abstraction without sacrificing performance.

As a systems language, Rust provides extensive control over hardware resources. This makes it as efficient as C and C++ in many benchmarks, with added security guarantees.

Since Rust is explicit and has no runtime, it can perform internal connections, loop unwinding, and other aggressive optimizations.

# 2. Advantages of Rust

Rust combines various programming styles: procedural, Actor-based concurrency, Object Oriented, and pure function. It also supports general and metaprogramming in static and dynamic forms. Here is an overview of the main advantages of Rust.

Easy to deploy:

Without active use, Rust’s powerful security and integrity tools are meaningless. The creators and community of Rust make it easy for beginners to master this language. The software packages required to generate Rust binary files are unified. Only when working with components outside the Rust system (such as compiling C libraries from source code), external compilers like GCCO are needed.

Powerful type system:

Using Rust, compiling code with detectable errors is not allowed. This feature allows developers to focus on the core logic of the program rather than correcting the problem.

Cross-platform compatibility:

Although Rust is compatible with most modern platforms, its developers did not aim to make it a universal language, but focused on popular platforms. Rust can run on three main operating systems: Linux, Windows, and MacOS. If cross-compiling or generating binary files for another platform or architecture is required, Rust is also relatively easy to implement.

Powerful features:

Rust has a set of native features comparable to C++: macros, generics, pattern matching, and composition through “features”.

Comprehensive standard library:

One of Rust’s broader goals is to provide alternatives comparable to C and C++. Therefore, it provides a wide range of standard libraries including containers, collections, iterators, string operations, process and thread management, etc. As Rust aims to be cross-platform, its standard library only includes general portable features. Platform-specific functions can be obtained through third-party libraries. In addition, Rust can run without a standard library, which is particularly useful when developing platform-independent binaries such as embedded systems.

Selection of third-party libraries:

The versatility of a language often depends on the third-party support it receives. Rust’s official repository Cargo hosts over 60,000 “crates”, many of which are API bindings of popular libraries or frameworks. However, these crates do not have a comprehensive ranking system based on quality, so you must rely on personal experience or community advice.

IDE support:

The Rust team developed rust-analyzer, which can provide real-time feedback from Rust compilers to IDEs, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code.

Open source:

As an open-source language, Rust benefits from the contributions of a global developer community, constantly improving its performance. It is especially friendly for beginners. It also regularly updates detailed and transparent language documentation.

# 3. Rust ecosystem

One important advantage of Rust is its extensive ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and libraries.

Cargo：

Cargo is the official package manager and compiler for Rust. It handles project building, dependency management, and test execution. Developers use crates.io as the official regedit for Rust packages, managed by the Rust community and integrated with Cargo.

Rustup：

Rustup is a tool that simplifies Rust version management, allowing you to switch and update between different Rust toolchains.

Development Environment:

Many Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and text editors now support Rust development, including Visual Studio Code, Atom, and IntelliJ IDEA.

Libraries and Frameworks:

Rust’s library and framework ecosystem continues to expand, covering applications such as web development, gaming, and Machine Learning. Some popular libraries and frameworks include Rocket, Tokio, Serde, and Actix.

Rust-analyzer：

Rust-analyzer is an efficient and reliable language server that provides features such as code analysis and auto-completion for Rust code. It is easy to use and compatible with multiple text editors and IDEs.

Rustfmt is a formatting tool specifically designed to ensure uniform formatting of Rust code.

Rich learning resources:

Rust provides a lot of useful documentation. Here are some useful resources collected:

• The Rust Programming Language Book (in-depth explanation of Rust and its core concepts)
• Rust Language Cheat Sheet
• Rust Atomics and Locks. Low-Level Concurrency in Practice by Mara Bos (book)
• Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development by by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, Leonora Tindall (book)
• Rust by Example (collection of annotated code samples)
• Rust Install documents
• Rust Installer download page
• Rust design patterns
• Rust in Motion (paid video course)
• Rust in blockchain (weekly newsletter)
• Serokell’s selection of the best Rust learning resources

# 4. Rust development roadmap

# 5. Challenges of Rust development

Rust programming language provides many advantages, such as enhanced security, excellent performance, simplified concurrency programming, and ensuring memory safety. However, Rust is not without its drawbacks. Some common challenges when using Rust include:

• Steep learning curve: For beginners, concepts such as ownership, borrowing, and lifecycle in Rust can be confusing, especially for those who have not been exposed to these concepts.
• Lengthy syntax: Some people criticize the language’s verbose syntax, which can be seen as both an advantage (explicit rather than implicit) and a disadvantage (requiring verbose code to implement simple tasks).
• Limited libraries: While the Rust ecosystem is growing rapidly, it lags behind more mature languages like Python, Java, or JavaScript in terms of the number and diversity of third-party libraries.
• Compile time: A frequently mentioned disadvantage is the long compile time. This may slow down development speed, especially in larger projects.
• Maturity: Although Rust is a stable language, it is still younger than many competitors. Therefore, certain features and best practices are still evolving.
• Simplified runtime: This is both an advantage and a challenge. Although it allows Rust to be used in system programming and resource-constrained environments, it also means that the language does not have as many built-in features as languages with more complete runtimes.

# Finally

A survey shows that Rust is becoming more and more popular among developers. The 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shows that 13% of people have extensive work experience on Rust recently, and from 2016 to 2023, this language has been the “most popular”. Rust also ranks sixth in the “most popular technology” in 2023.

The combination of advanced abstraction and fine grain control makes Rust the preferred choice for developing safe and efficient system software. With the increasing recognition of Rust in the developer community, it may become the dominant language in more fields.