Rust is a programming language developed by Mozilla Research. Rust combines low-level control over performance with high-level convenience and safety guarantees.

It achieves these goals without requiring a garbage collector or runtime, making it possible to use Rust libraries as a “drop-in replacement” for C.

Rust’s first release, 0.1, occurred in January 2012, and for 3 years development moved so quickly that until recently the use of stable releases was discouraged and instead the general advice was to use nightly builds.

On May 15th 2015, Rust 1.0 was released with a complete guarantee of backward compatibility. Improvements to compile times and other aspects of the compiler are currently available in the nightly builds. Rust has adopted a train-based release model with regular releases every six weeks. Rust 1.1 beta was made available at the same time of the release of Rust 1.0.

Although Rust is a relatively low-level language, it has some functional concepts that are generally found in higher-level languages. This makes Rust not only fast, but also easy and efficient to code in.