Rust is a statically typed, compiled systems programming language begun by Graydon Hoare as a personal project in 2006, officially sponsored by Mozilla from 2009, and first stably released as Rust 1.0 in May 2015. Its defining feature is the ownership system: the compiler enforces memory safety and thread safety entirely at compile time, through a component called the borrow checker, eliminating whole categories of bugs (dangling pointers, data races, buffer overflows) common in C and C++ — without needing a garbage collector at runtime.
The elevator, and a decade at Mozilla
In 2006, Mozilla engineer Graydon Hoare began sketching Rust as a personal side project, reportedly after climbing 21 flights of stairs when his apartment building's elevator broke down — again — due to a software crash. Mozilla began officially sponsoring the project in 2009 and announced it publicly in 2010, using it for the experimental Servo browser engine. The language changed substantially during this period: early Rust had a garbage collector and a very different type system, both of which were removed or reworked by around 2013 in favor of the ownership model Rust is known for today. Rust 1.0, the first release with a stability guarantee, shipped on May 15, 2015.
Ownership: memory safety without a garbage collector
Rust's central idea is that every value has exactly one owner, and the compiler tracks ownership through the program to guarantee memory is freed exactly once, with no dangling references — all checked at compile time, with zero runtime cost. This is genuinely different from garbage-collected languages (Go, Java, Python), which check similar things at runtime, and from C/C++, which don't check them at all and leave correctness to the programmer.
fn main() {
let s1 = String::from("hello");
let s2 = s1; // ownership MOVES to s2
println!("{}", s2); // fine
// println!("{}", s1); // COMPILE ERROR: s1 no longer owns the data
}A later chapter covers ownership and borrowing in full — this is just a glimpse of the rule that shapes almost everything else about writing Rust.
Where Rust is used today
Rust is heavily used for systems software where C/C++ was the traditional default: parts of the Linux kernel (accepted starting 2022), Firefox's rendering engine components, the Deno and Bun JavaScript runtimes, and infrastructure tools like ripgrep and the uv Python package manager. Companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, and Cloudflare use it in production, commonly citing performance comparable to C/C++ alongside compile-time memory safety as the deciding factors.