If you are looking for some kind of metal panel business idea, allow me to be clear: the Rust I am referring to is a programming language.

Still there?

When I started learning programming languages I was 8 years old, the world was in different shapes and computers were more like romantic and

magical boxes rather than the tools people TikTok with today.

GW-Basic and C were my first shots in computer science during the time in which memory was directly accessible — for the fun of many and the profit of others. It was so easy to perform brutal attacks on the operating system kernel via some legit constructs that those languages provided.

My years in academia have been characterized by the massive use of C (much less of C++) for back-end systems and implementing common and more exotic algorithms in computer science. Big jump ahead, the years of my Ph.D. have been characterized by the massive use of C and instructing

compilers to mitigate some of the nasty issues all low-level programming languages are affected by, which is direct access to memory.

Hence, issues like forgetting that you have already freed memory (double free), reading/writing beyond the limits of an array (buffer overflow), pointing and accessing invalid memory, etc. have led to some of the most serious attacks we know in the history of computer science so far.

So what does this have to do with Rust?

As a matter of fact, Rust has literally wiped off most of my Ph.D. material in one new programming paradigm. And I am not pissed at all.

My most ambitious objective (and not only mine) during my Ph.D. was to

build a compiler that fixed the double free issues, buffer overflows and invalid pointers, automatically (sometimes without even informing the developer who ended up repeating that nasty bug over and over — how

mean?).

Rust has done just that: it has moved many of the responsibilities from the

developer to the compiler (for Python programmers, the compiler is that

thing you give up your flexibility and performance to, every time you write well… Python) by introducing a new paradigm of programming.

In such a paradigm it is not possible to have those bugs ever. The compiler will just refuse to continue and generate a buggy program. The only side effect of the more pedantic Rust compiler is that it will definitely frustrate the developer. But I don’t have a solution for that. Time for another Ph.D.?

Rust provides this level of awesomeness by leveraging five fundamental concepts in programming language design. While some are tightly related, let me briefly go through each of them.

#rust #programming #computer-science #code-quality #programming-languages #concurrency #software-engineering