Rust Celebrates 10 Years Since Version 1.0
Written by Mike James   
Saturday, 17 May 2025

Rust reached the milestone of Version 1.0 becoming generally available on May 15, 2015. Version 1.87 has just been released on the 10th anniversary with a celebratory event in Utrecht during Rust week, its annual developer conference.

rust

You may regard Rust as a language still in its infancy - but in fact it had been under development for some years before we ever got to hear about it. It originated in 2006 as a personal project by Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla employee.  Hoare's motivation for the new systems language stemmed from frustrations with the memory management issues and concurrency challenges prevalent in languages like C and C++. A specific impetus was the failure of the elevator in his apartment building in Vancouver where he lived on the 21st floor due to software crashes. As he climbed the stairs, Hoare reflected:

“It’s ridiculous that we computer people couldn’t even make an elevator that works without crashing!” 

Deciding to do something about it he began designing a new computer language that he hoped would make it possible to write small, fast code without memory bugs and named it Rust, after a group of remarkably hardy fungi that he considered:

“over-engineered for survival.”

Initially Rust was a private endeavor, developed by Hoare in his spare time, using concepts from older languages as influences. They included CLU (1974), BETA (1975), Mesa (1977), NIL (1981), Erlang (1987), Newsqueak (1988), Napier (1988), Hermes (1990), Sather (1990), Alef (1992), and Limbo (1996). Of these Erlang stands out as one that we still encounter today and some among them I've never heard of.

In 2009 Hoare told colleagues at Mozilla about it. The potential of using Rust for a safer web browser engine intrigued Brendan Eich, Mozilla's co-founder and its CTO at that time and Mozilla officially sponsored the Rust project, allocating engineers like Patrick Walton, Niko Matsakis, Felix Klock, and Manish Goregaokar to the development team.

By 2010, the core concept of Rust's ownership system was in place and in the period before the initial stable release saw substantial evolution and refinement of Rust's type system. Key changes included the removal of the explicit object-oriented features (obj keyword), the typestate system, and, most notably, the garbage collector. The focus shifted towards memory management through the ownership and borrowing system to ensure memory safety without runtime overhead and features like pure functions and specialized syntax for channels were removed to simplify the language.

Graydon Hoare stepped down from leading the Rust project in 2013, allowing for a more distributed governance structure. A "core team" was established, and a Request for Comments (RFC) process for new language features was introduced in March 2014. This fostered greater community involvement in the language's development.   

Rust remained within Mozilla where it was mainly being used for for Servo, the company's experimental browser-rendering engine. As reported in Mozilla Layoffs and Change of Focus, this project was axed in August 2020 and Rust was effectively booted out of its long-time nest. It was however able to fend for itself and in February 2021 the Rust Foundation was formed to oversee its governance. Mozilla was a founding member together with Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei and Microsoft, with Meta joining a few weeks later.

I Programmer's first report on Rust came with the release of Version 0.4 in November 2012 which was notable for the full integration of borrowed pointers. We covered two more pre-stable releases before the arrival of Version 1.0. initially as an alpha in January 2015 when we reported that:

Rust is backed by Mozilla and is described on its website as:
“a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents almost all crashes, and eliminates data races".

Looking back 10 years at my own coverage of the release of Rust 1.0 I had some things right:

Rust is a really nice language with some clever ideas that do make system programming safe. The guiding principle seems to be that the language has to be constructed in such a way that problems can be detected at compile time. The idea goes beyond simple type checking to the point where a program that could have a null pointer error cannot compile. The reason for this approach is that if you check the program for correctness at compile time you can produce a binary that doesn't have to do any more checking and so it can be fast. 

The key idea in Rust is ownership. When you declare a variable and set it to some data it owns the data. This means the lifetime of the variable controls the lifetime of the data. When the variable goes out of scope the data is destroyed and the memory returned to the system. Other variables can "borrow" the data owned by a variable, but there are extensive rules on what can be done and what cannot so as to make dangling pointers impossible. In principle, this and other Rust features should make it impossible, or at least difficult, to write a program that access memory it isn't supposed to access. 

But there are a couple of sentences about Rust as a C replacement where 10 years later I have to admit I got it wrong: 

Linus Torvalds won't have C++ in the Linux kernel and he is probably correct. Would he have Rust? Probably not, no make that certainly not!

Well I have to admit that I was betting on Linus' love of C to cloud his judgment, but I was wrong. Today it isn't so much Linus holding back on Rust as other Linux maintainers who seem to see their knowledge of C under threat. Despite this resistance Rust is moving into the Linux kernel.

Following Rust over the years it has rapidly become a go-to language. By 2023 there were 2.8 million coders writing in Rust, with companies from Microsoft to Amazon regarding it as key to their future. The chat platform Discord used Rust to speed up its system, Dropbox uses it to sync files to your computer, and Cloudflare uses it to process more than 20% of all internet traffic. Even the US government is avidly promoting software in Rust as a way to make its processes more secure.

In the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey Rust is consistently rated the most “loved” and the most "wanted" programming language - meaning that its users are keen to continue using it and those who haven't used it are keen to try it out and last year saw it win the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award which recognizes a software system that has had a significant impact with the citation:

Rust is the first industrial strength programming language to offer a compelling answer to the challenge of being a safe systems programming language. 

The release of the latest version, Rust 1.87 was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Rust 1.0. So what's new? In a nutshell,  Rust 1.87 adds anonymous pipes to the standard library, safe architecture intrinsics, inline Assembly via "asm!" can now jump to labeled blocks within Rust code, and a large number of stabilized APIs. It also removes its i586 Windows MSVC (i586-pc-windows-msvc) target for old processors. There are more details in this announcement

Go to Install Rust to start using version 1.87  

rust foundation logo

 

 

More Information

Announcing Rust 1.87.0 and ten years of Rust!

rust-lang.org

Rust on Github

Rust Foundation Website 

Related Articles

Rust Hits Stable 1.0 - So What?

Rust 1.0 Alpha Released       

Rust 0.4 Full Integration of Borrowed Pointers

Mozilla Layoffs - The Fallout

Rust Team Announces Rust Foundation

Facebook Open Source Joins Rust Foundation

Rust Gets Into The Kernel

Rust Wins Award For Significant Impact

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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 20 May 2025 )