Rust is a systems programming language designed to give you C-level performance with a memory-safety guarantee enforced at compile time. The borrow checker — Rust's most distinctive feature — prevents data races and dangling pointers without a garbage collector. The cost is a steeper learning curve; the payoff is a language that scales from kernel modules to web servers without sacrificing the same primitives.
Rust adoption is now mainstream in places where C and C++ used to be defaults: parts of the Linux kernel, Mozilla's rendering engines, AWS Firecracker, the Cloudflare workers runtime, the npm CLI rewrite, and large parts of Microsoft's Windows codebase. Most JavaScript build tools (Turbopack, Rspack, Biome, swc, oxc) are now Rust binaries.
What you'll work with in these 18 courses
- Ownership, borrowing, lifetimes — the borrow checker's mental model
- Traits, generics, type inference, the trait system
- Async Rust:
tokio,async/await, futures, pinning - Web frameworks: Axum, Actix-web, Rocket
- FFI: cbindgen, wasm-bindgen, neon for Node, PyO3 for Python
- Cargo, rustfmt, clippy, the Rust toolchain
