Lunch talks #9: Why we should take our attention to Rust

People is usually moved by tendencies and easily jump aboard the "hype train", specially developers, me included. A few months ago I started reading about Rust, a "new" programming language that was created by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare in 2006. Howewer the first stable version was released in 2015 and it started gaining popularity since then.

At Codegram we usually develop our projects with Ruby and Javascript but we love new technologies and we also started working with Elixir. How does a systems programming language like Rust fit here? To answer this question I decided that Rust would be the next topic of our Lunch Talks.

Ashley Williams - How I Convinced the World's Largest Package Manager to Use Rust, and So Can You! (37 min)

In this talk Ashley Williams explained how to convince your company to use Rust. She made a list of 10 tips on how to accomplish this task and told us about the NPM team adopting Rust on its daily basis.

Lambda World 2018 - Rust and Haskell, sitting in a tree - Lisa Passing (32 min)

Lisa Passing compares the functional features of Rust with a pure functional language like Haskell. Rust is a multi-paradigm language but it includes a lot of features that make functional programming possible.

JFuture 2018: Steve Klabnik - Building Scalable Web Services in Rust (30 min)

At Codegram our background is mostly web based and I wanted to know if it was possible to use Rust to build web services. In this talk, Steve Klabnik introduces Rust syntax and talks about some web frameworks that can be used to start building web services. If you are curious about this too visit https://www.arewewebyet.org/ to know more about it.

Rust & WebAssembly with Nick Fitzgerald (31 min)

WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is also gaining more popularity day after day. In fact, at the moment of writing this the wasm team has announced WASI: a new system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web.

You can target wasm (or WASI) when compiling Rust. This is very important for writing high-performance applications in Javascript. In this video Nick Fitzgerald describes the current status of Rust & WebAssembly.

In conclusion, to answer the question "How does a systems programming language like Rust fit here?", after watching these videos we decided to start slow and give Rust a try to start building small web micro services with it. Since we can target WebAssembly we can also replace some time consuming parts of our web applications and write them in Rust too. If you want to write fast and memory efficient code you should definitely take your attention to Rust!

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