Rust

Hello World in Rust

Every programming journey starts with Hello World. Let’s write our first Rust program.

The Code

Create a file named hello.rs:

1
2
3

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, World!");
} …

Variables and Types in Rust

Rust’s type system is one of its defining features—static, strong, and powerful enough to catch entire classes of bugs at compile time. But it’s also ergonomic: the compiler infers types …

The Language Inside the Language: A Tour of Metaprogramming

Every programming language eventually runs into the same wall: the programmer knows something at write time that the language cannot express directly. How to serialize a thousand different types …

The Languages That Tried to Kill C++ (And What Happened to Them)

The history of systems programming is, in part, a long procession of people standing up to announce that they had built a better C++.

They weren’t wrong. Many of them had built something better …

0 or 1? The Array Indexing War That Never Ended

Ask a programmer which languages start arrays at 0 and which start them at 1, and you’ll get a confident answer. Ask them why, and the conversation gets interesting fast.

Most developers assume …

Channels, Actors, and Goroutines: The Concurrency Models That Divided Language Design

In 1973, Carl Hewitt published a paper describing something he called the Actor model — isolated computational units that communicated exclusively by message passing, with no shared memory, no locks, …

The Many Ways to Fail: Error Handling Philosophies Across Programming Languages

Every program that has ever run has eventually encountered something unexpected. A file that wasn’t there. A network that dropped the connection. A number that divided by zero. A user who typed …

Who Taught Your Language to Remember? A Tour of Memory Management

In our three-part series on web backend performance, we measured idle memory ranging from 3 MB (Rust) to 500 MB (Spring Boot). We noted that a garbage collector explained much of Java’s …

The Billion-Dollar Mistake, 60 Years Later: How Languages Handle Null

In 2009, Tony Hoare stood at the QCon conference in London and confessed to a crime.

“I call it my billion-dollar mistake,” he said. “It was the invention of the null reference in …

def, func, fun, fn, sub: Why Every Language Has a Different Word for the Same Thing

Open almost any programming language reference and you will find, somewhere near the beginning, a section explaining how to define a reusable named block of code. The concept is universal. The word …