Intro
Going off the theme of Elixir’s Domain I figured I’d check out what Rust’s real world applications are. I’m already learning and building in the language so it’d be good to know how others use it and where it shines.
Overview
Rust is used in a wide range of projects.
Including:
- Cloud infrastructre.
- Backend Web Dev.
- Embedded Systems.
- Security Tools.
- High performance network applications.
Thanks to the memory safety features that come with it, it’s provided teams with reliability and resource efficiency.
Industry Use Cases
- Embedded systems: (smart devices, IoT, robotics): Rust’s minimal runtime and control over memory make it well-suited for firmware and embedded controllers in cars, medical equipment, IoT sensors, and more.
- Operating systems and Drivers: Projects like
Redox OS, microcontroller firmware, and even some Windows system libraries are written in Rust. - Network and Cloud Services: High-performance proxies, log collectors, microservices, and serverless compute platforms often leverage Rust for safe concurrency and performance.
- Web services and APIs: Rust is used with frameworks like Actix and Axum to build highly concurrent and scalable REST APIs.
- Security tools: Its ability to remove whole classes of memory bugs makes Rust attractive for critical security and cryptographic software.
Examples
- AWS built Firecracker, the microVM underpinning AWS Lambda and Fargate, in Rust for fast, secure containerized workloads.
- Meta rebuilt core monorepo tools with Rust to solve concurrency and speed issues.
- Dropbox’s sync engine and Discord’s real-time chat backend both benefit from Rust replacing older languages for better CPU usage and reliability.[](
Command Line and Desktop Tools
It’s very popular among oss and indie developers for building fast, reliable CLI tools.
Some notable examples include ripgrep, exa, and fd.
Terminal User Interfaces (TUIs)
There are a few tui libraries (crates) out there for building full UIs in the terminal.
Cross Platform Desktop Apps
Frameworks like Tauri empower building cross platform apps that are fast and much lighter than their Electron counterparts.