Fast, safe, easy to write—pick any two. That’s been the state of software development for a good long time now. Languages that emphasize convenience and safety tend to be slow (like Python). Languages that emphasize performance tend to be difficult to work with and easy to blow off your feet with (like C and C++).

Can all three of those attributes be delivered in a single language? More important, can you get the world to work with it? The Rust language, originally created by Graydon Hoare and currently sponsored by Mozilla Research, is an attempt to do just those things. (The Google Go language has similar ambitions, but Rust aims to make as few concessions to performance as possible.)

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