To grasp what makes Rust so useful, it’s worth taking a peek beneath the hood at how programming languages deal with computer memory. But it’s meteor-strike rare for one to take hold and become part of the pantheon of well-known languages alongside, say, JavaScript or Python or Java.
Plenty of coders create little ones as side projects all the time. It isn’t unusual for someone to make a new computer language. He named it Rust, after a group of remarkably hardy fungi that are, he says, “over-engineered for survival.” He opened his laptop and began designing a new computer language, one that he hoped would make it possible to write small, fast code without memory bugs. But Hoare decided to do something about it. Most of us, if we found ourselves trudging up 21 flights of stairs, would just get pissed off and leave it there. Microsoft estimates that 70% of the vulnerabilities in its code are due to memory errors from code written in these languages. The problem is those languages also make it easy to accidentally introduce memory bugs-errors that will cause a crash. The software inside devices like elevators is often written in languages like C++ or C, which are famous for allowing programmers to write code that runs very quickly and is quite compact. “It’s ridiculous,” he thought, “that we computer people couldn’t even make an elevator that works without crashing! ” Many such crashes, Hoare knew, are due to problems with how a program uses memory. Hoare lived on the 21st floor, and as he climbed the stairs, he got annoyed.
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