Rust is a system language that uses a ownership and borrowing system enforced at compile time to ensure memory safety without needing a garbage collector.
Setup
Rust has its installation management tool rustup, compiler rustc and package manager cargo.
Compiler
Rust's compiler checks for many things such as array indexing, and prevents many types of memory bugs common in C/C++:
- Dangling pointers
- Use-after-free
- Double free
Note that Rust has an unsafe keyword, which can bypass compiler checks and allow potential memory corruption if misused.
- Raw pointer dereferencing
Compiling flow
- The Rust compiler converts Rust code into Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) Intermediate Representation (IR), which is a platform-independent representation.
- The LLVM optimizes and translates the IR to assembly specific to our CPU architecture.
- The assembler compiles assembly into binary.