From Python to Java, there are plenty of languages that have been used for programming over the years. However, a newcomer is showing a lot of potential: Rust. True enough, Stack Overflow’s annual survey featured Rust as the most-loved programming language in 2020. This was its fifth straight year topping the charts.

What is Rust?

Rust is a mostly static language that gives you control over “low-level” details (like memory usage) without the hassle associated with controlling it. Plus, its stability and backward compatibility make it the best program for in-breeding across multiple languages, allowing it to be used for a lot of purposes. For example, typically, mechanical information needs to be supplied by an MCAD tool. However, Rust’s flexible framework makes searching for 3D components in a footprint library much faster, decreasing the number of design spins needed to assemble electric circuits. It’s also incredibly fast, making it a favorite in embedded electronics and operating system development.

Is Rust Suitable for Web Development?

But what about web development? Can rust be used for such a purpose? The short answer is yes, and here’s why.

It creates efficient templates

Rust is practically created for web templating language support, with the likes of Handlebars and Tera handling most of the processes. Rust offers static dispatch of traits and tracks ownership of variables, making it much faster than any other language available. Compared to JavaScript’s implementation of Handlebars, Rust does so in half the speed, or even faster.

It’s static, with a lot of flexibility

If you want to produce a dynamic webpage, then your best bet is a dynamic language; or so you think. Static languages like C or C++ enable compiler-checked constraints on the produced data, disabling any errors produced from cognitive overhead. It’s arguably the best type to use for websites and other projects that have multiple pages.

However, a lot of statically typed languages can get frustrating to handle. After all, they mandate that you repeat the type of a variable many times, affecting its readability. Fortunately, Rust is more “dynamic” than others, allowing priority items like function constants to have explicit types.

It places a strong emphasis on memory safety

One of the biggest concerns when developing websites, or any program, is its memory safety. The two most used languages in web development, C and C++, are incredibly memory unsafe. They even caused more than 70% of all security bugs on Google Chrome. C and C++ allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic with no bounds checking regulations, opening their end products to a lot of backdoors. Rust doesn’t have that issue. With most of the features of C and C++, Rust puts an additional emphasis on memory safety by having a borrow checker to validate references.

Rust is a great language to use for web development, whether that’s because of its security features, user-friendliness, or speed. Its only downside is that it’s fairly new, so it might not have your preferred library or frameworks like Django and Laravel. Still, given time, Rust will have them available.

Summary

In this post we went through some reasons describing why rust is a good language of choice for web development.