10 years of Rust: The programming language celebrates its anniversary

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The Rust programming language is celebrating its tenth anniversary: the first stable version was released on May 15, 2015.

The Rust team organized an anniversary celebration in Utrecht as part of Rust Week 2025. Coincidentally, the release date of the new version, which is released every six weeks, also coincided with the birthday, so the team announced Rust 1.87 live on stage. The details of the new version can be found in the Rust blog.

Memory security and performance

The programming language was designed for security from the outset and is particularly impressive due to its concepts for memory security. Memory errors are still responsible for the majority of critical vulnerabilities in the software.

Rust dispenses with the overhead of a garbage collector and instead relies, among other things, on the ownership concept: loosely based on the movie Highlander, there can only be one – each object has exactly one owner. Rust uses the RAII principle (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization). The compiler reserves resources when an object is created and releases them again as soon as the object leaves the scope.

Permanent backwards compatibility with editions

Another strength of Rust is its backwards compatibility. This includes the promise that the Rust compiler will continue to compile any code since the first stable Rust release. New Rust versions are released at regular six-week intervals and do not introduce any incompatibilities. In order to be able to introduce major changes that would not be possible without breaking changes, there are different editions of Rust.

The special thing about this is that developers determine which edition their software uses and can combine different editions when integrating packages. Most of the new features of Rust are included in all editions.

So far, there are four editions with the original Rust 2015. Version 1.31 opened Rust 2018, and in the course of the release, the Rust team explained the difference between switching to a new edition and jumping to a new major version in an article on Mozilla Hacks.

Above all, the update should cause as few breaking changes as possible. At the time, the team introduced the async/await pattern, which had the side effect of introducing the new keywords async and await. This could become a problem if code used the previously unreserved terms as variable names, for example.

The next edition, Rust 2021, introduced closures, among other things, and enables iteration via arrays by value with its own trait. A detailed article on Rust 2024, which was released slightly late in 2025, will be published next week as part of the Ferris Talk column on heise.

From motivation to the Rust Foundation

Rust inventor Graydon Hoare, who had worked at Mozilla, was unhappy with the compromises that had to be made when writing C++. In an interview with heise developer, he declared memory safety to be Rust's greatest strength. Hoare originally started the language as a personal project in his spare time back in 2006. He only spoke about it publicly for the first time in 2009.

Mozilla then used Rust with the idea of a secure browser engine, among other things. It took another three years from version 0.1 to the first stable release, during which time the type system and the ownership model were developed. The garbage collector originally integrated into Rust also disappeared in the process.

When Mozilla laid off a quarter of its employees in 2020, some wondered what would happen next with Rust. As a result, the Rust Foundation was created at the beginning of 2021 as a non-profit organization that takes care of the programming language.

Rust in Linux, Android and at Microsoft

Lately, many large organizations and companies have committed to Rust. The programming language has found its way into the Linux kernel, and many command line tools for Linux and Unix now exist as Rust ports.

Google is increasingly using Rust for Android and has opened up Chromium for Rust. Microsoft also swears by Rust and has published components for the development of Windows drivers in Rust. In 2022, the CTO of Microsoft Azure called for Rust to be used instead of C or C++ for new projects.

However, Rust is not an island and is often combined with C or C++. The Rust Foundation has therefore set out to improve interoperability and, at the end of 2024, named three key strategies in a "C++/Rust Interoperability Problem Statement" to improve the interaction between the programming languages.

In any case, Rust is here to stay. So, together with the Rust mascot Ferris, designed by Karen Rustad Tölva, we wish you a very happy tenth birthday, Rust!

(rme)