This week in Nature: "Why scientists are turning to Rust"

Why scientists are turning to Rust

Despite having a steep learning curve, the programming language offers speed and safety.

In 2015, bioinformatician Johannes Köster was what he called “kind of a full-time Python guy”. He had already written one popular tool — the workflow manager Snakemake — in the programming language. Now he was contemplating a project that required a level of computational performance that Python simply couldn’t deliver. So he began casting about for something new.

Köster, now at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, was looking for a language that offered the “expressiveness” of Python but the speed of languages such as C and C++. In other words, “a high-performance language that is still, let’s say, ergonomic to use”, he explains. What he found was Rust.

First created in 2006 by Graydon Hoare as a side project while working at browser-developer Mozilla, headquartered in Mountain View, California, Rust blends the performance of languages such as C++ with friendlier syntax, a focus on code safety and a well-engineered set of tools that simplify development. 

(see the rest in Nature)