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Rust is a programming language that is growing in popularity and Facebook has taken notice
The popular messaging app WhatsApp is based on the RUST language and RUST is used to create a new version of the popular messaging app Telegram. The constant improvement of the language is more than impressive as it has been said that Rust offers the best programming language in existence. The RUST programming language is not only becoming popular with programmers but also for being used by Facebook on projects such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
Rust was created by Mozilla to overcome some of the limitations of other languages
There are only about a dozen other programming languages that can be used in browser-based applications, and only one of them is free to use. (C++ is not free and Java is pretty limited.) If you have a website that needs to communicate with a server, you have to pay for a license to use Java. (Netscape used to try to sell that separately, but now it’s baked into the browser.) If you want desktop applications on top of Firefox, the cost is higher still.
Mozilla says that Firefox should be more than just another browser–it’s the new desktop. (Cue the fanboy cries of “Firefox is the new Windows.”) To keep up with Microsoft and Google, Mozilla will have to support its own languages, either natively or through JavaScript. And various other projects, such as web applications for iOS, now make their programming languages available over the Web. Mozilla has chosen the latter route for its own browser, and Rust is the tool it has chosen to make that happen.
Facebook has decided to use Rust for some of its back-end development
Facebook is a public company, so the details of their internal development aren’t secret. (Blogs like ours can provide some insight, but that’s all.) They are also moving some of their systems over to RUST, including their Aurora server-side code and various other parts of their back end. Facebook has been reluctant to advertise this because they don’t want proprietary or non-public code in their products, and also because this technology is fairly new. They have hired Rust developer Patrick Walton to help with the transition.
Titanium and Zinc are the main projects Facebook is working on right now. Titanium is a very large system that connects to many other webservers, written in PHP. (Example: “How to Get Started with Facebook Platform”.) It gets about 1 million hits per second.
While still in its early stages, Rust shows great promise for the future
Rust is designed to run on any OS that runs the GNU Compiler Collection, which means it should work with Linux, Mac OS and Windows. The language supports several other implementations including Servo and Iron. Patrick Walton says that Rust’s ethos of “never say die” means it will probably always be developed. He predicts that the language will get better over time as developers work out the kinks. “It’s like a teenager,” Walton said. “It still needs to be told what to do.”
Rust’s greatest advantage is that it is safe, which means it eliminates many security threats that plague developers. Unlike C and C++, Rust does not suffer from buffer overflows and other errors that can wreak havoc on a system. It also has a built-in garbage collector eliminating the need for developers to worry about memory management themselves.
Walton says that Facebook has found the language appealing because it helps them find bugs early in development. “We have very high code coverage with our tests, but we still had to wait around six months just to find those last few bugs that are not covered in tests,” Walton said. “The compiler tells us about them immediately.”
