Introduction to Rust and its Ecosystem

The Rust programming language is sponsored by Mozilla and supported by a community of developers from across the globe. Rust is promoted as a systems programming language that supports automatic memory management without the overhead of a runtime or a garbage collector, concurrency without data races enforced by the compiler, and zero cost abstractions and generics. In subsequent sections, we will discuss these features in more detail. Rust is statically typed and borrows a number of functional programming ideas. A fascinating aspect of Rust is the use of the type system to guarantee memory safety without using a runtime. This makes Rust uniquely suitable for low-resource embedded devices and real-time systems, which require strong guarantees around code correctness. On the flip side, this often means that the compiler has to do a lot more...