The first numbered pre-alpha release of the Rust compiler occurred in January 2012. Named rustc, it successfully compiled itself in 2011. The same year, work shifted from the initial compiler (written in OCaml) to an LLVM-based self-hosting compiler written in Rust. Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009 and announced it in 2010. Hoare has stated that the project was possibly named after rust fungi and that the name is also a substring of 'robust'. The language grew out of a personal project begun in 2006 by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. Rust has been voted the 'most loved programming language' in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey every year since 2016, though only used by 7% of the respondents in 2021. It has gained increasing use and investment in industry, by companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Discord, and Dropbox. Rust's major influences include C++, OCaml, Haskell, and Erlang.

The designers refined the language while writing the Servo experimental browser engine and the Rust compiler. Rust was originally designed by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla Research, with contributions from Dave Herman, Brendan Eich, and others. Rust has been called a systems programming language and in addition to high-level features such as functional programming it also offers mechanisms for low-level memory management. Rust achieves memory safety without garbage collection, and reference counting is optional. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references. Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Illumos, Haiku, Android, Redox, iOS, Fuchsia Affine, inferred, nominal, static, strongĪMD64, i686, arm, AArch64, armv7, mips, mips64, mipsel, mips64el, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, risc-v, s390x, WebAssembly

Rust language