A broken elevator gave birth to Rust, one of the best…

One gloomy evening 17 years ago, developer Graydon Hoare from the Mozilla team was wearily climbing the 21st floor of the house in which he lived. Not because he loved unplanned cardio workouts, but because of the breakdown of the building's elevator. The reason was a memory failure of a device that was too “smart” at that time, which used software written in an outdated language.

The resulting negative experience inspired Hoare to create a new programming language called "Rust". It was a compromise between C++ and Java approaches. The first provided the flexibility of composing functions, but required strict control over the state of memory, errors threatened to cause the application to fail - which happened with the ill-fated elevator. In Java, to solve the problem, a garbage service was added, which itself periodically cleaned the memory. But this approach required a lot of resources and was not suitable for cheap ubiquitous systems, including the same elevators.

In Rust, the state of memory is tracked by the language itself on behalf of the programmer, but the latter must follow a set of strict coding rules. The resulting programs ruled out memory problems, so the idea quickly gained popularity, and the language began to develop. Gradually, the garbage collector was removed from it, the coding rules were simplified, and in 2015 the first stable release of Rust was released. Today it is widely used in various industries and is officially recommended as the most memory-safe programming language.