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Rust

20 courses 2 categories

Part of Learn Programming

Rust is a systems programming language focused on memory safety without a garbage collector, achieved through the ownership and borrowing model that the compiler enforces at compile time. Originally created by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla and now governed by the Rust Foundation, the language has reached a stable ecosystem with a 6-week release cadence and a deep standard library.

Rust's adoption in 2026 spans several distinct areas. Systems-level work — operating system kernels (including parts of the Linux kernel), browser engines, databases, and runtimes — is the historical home. The newer wave is JavaScript tooling rewritten in Rust for speed: Turbopack, Rspack, swc, Biome, Deno's core, and Astro's Rolldown. WebAssembly turns Rust into a viable browser language, and embedded development continues to grow alongside no_std support.

What you'll find under this topic

  • Ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes — the model the compiler enforces
  • Type system: enums, traits, generics, trait objects, async traits
  • Concurrency: threads, channels, Send / Sync, Tokio and async/await
  • Error handling: Result, Option, ? operator, thiserror, anyhow
  • Web services: axum, actix-web, tower middleware, sqlx for databases
  • WebAssembly: wasm-bindgen, wasm-pack, integrating Rust into browser apps
  • Systems and embedded work: no_std, FFI, unsafe Rust, cross-compilation

Rust skills hire at infrastructure-heavy companies (Cloudflare, Discord, AWS, Microsoft for parts of Windows), the JS-tooling vendors rewriting their pipelines (Vercel, the Astro team, the swc / Biome maintainers), crypto and blockchain teams (Solana's validator is Rust), and an increasingly mainstream backend market where memory safety and predictable performance matter. Roles include systems engineer, platform / runtime engineer, and the growing "Rust backend" role at performance-sensitive services.

Categories (2)

Rust thumbnail
Rust
Rust is a systems programming language designed to give you C-level performance with a memory-safety guarantee enforced…
WebAssembly thumbnail
WebAssembly
WebAssembly (Wasm) is the binary instruction format that runs in browsers (and increasingly outside them, via runtimes…

Courses (20)

Showing 1 – 20 of 20 courses

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Frequently asked questions

Is Rust a good career bet in 2026?
Strong but specialised. Rust hiring concentrates in systems programming, infrastructure (databases, search engines, observability, browsers), cryptocurrency and zero-knowledge, embedded, and high-performance backend pockets at companies like Cloudflare, Discord, AWS, Meta, and Microsoft. Fewer total openings than mainstream languages but consistently high pay and minimal commoditisation pressure.
How hard is Rust really to learn?
Genuinely hard at first — the borrow checker forces you to think about ownership in a way no garbage-collected language demands. Most developers describe a difficult first 1–2 months followed by a click moment. Once ownership clicks, the rest of the language is comparable in complexity to modern C++ but with vastly better tooling and a smaller foot-gun surface.
Rust vs C++ — which should I learn?
Rust for new systems work and most new projects, C++ for game engines (Unreal), HFT, large existing codebases, and graphics. The career markets only partially overlap — many Rust engineers came from C++ and the reverse is rare. Modern Rust is strictly the more pleasant language to work in; the C++ market is larger but trending toward Rust gradually.
What does Rust actually get used for?
Operating systems and OS components, databases and storage engines, web browsers (Servo, parts of Chrome and Firefox), networking and proxies (Cloudflare workers, Pingora), CLI tools (ripgrep, fd, bat, hyperfine), embedded systems, cryptocurrency protocols, performance-critical libraries, and increasingly serverless platforms. Less common in CRUD apps where the borrow-checker overhead doesn't pay back.
Is Rust worth learning if I'm already a Go engineer?
Worth it if you want to expand into systems work, embedded, or performance-critical territory; Go covers most of what Rust covers for cloud-infrastructure use cases at a fraction of the learning cost. Many engineers learn Rust as a depth play rather than a job switch — the experience makes you a better systems thinker even if you keep shipping in Go.

Top instructors in Rust

Authors with the most Rust courses on CourseFlix.