Blockchain developers live in a world where technological innovations drive rapid advances, and few have been more impactful than the rise of Rust, a powerful programming language that turbocharges decentralized application development.
The Rust programming language was never developed for blockchain. Instead, it began its life in 2006 as an experimental project by the Mozilla researcher Graydon Hoare, who was trying to create a multi-paradigm programming language with efficient memory management and a focus on concurrency, performance, and safety.
As MIT Technology Review describes, Hoare first conceived Rust while living on the 21st floor of an apartment block, where the elevator often failed, forcing him to ascend the stairs far too frequently for his liking. He soon realized that the elevator’s regular downtime was a result of its software being written in a language known for its extremely buggy nature, particularly with regard to memory.
Hoare, therefore, decided to do something about it and began creating an entirely new computer language that would make it possible to write code quickly and in a streamlined fashion. The idea was to eliminate these memory problems that are thought to be responsible for up to 70% of the bugs in older coding languages. He called this new language “Rust”, in honor of a particularly hardy species of fungi.
Fast-forward almost two decades, and Rust has become one of the most popular programming languages around, adopted by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Discord, Dropbox, and Cloudflare. Developers love Rust because it enables them to build fast and reliable software with efficient memory usage and robust safety guarantees, with high concurrency and many other advantages.
Rust rules in blockchain
Rust has become especially popular in blockchain development, where it provides a couple of key advantages that are essential for the creation of healthy, decentralized networks. In particular, Rust is known for its straightforward syntax, which makes writing dApps much easier than in other languages. It also means it’s fairly simple for experienced programmers to learn.
The other key advantage is its memory safety, which avoids the need for a “garbage collector” used in languages such as Java. This is important, as the garbage collector significantly increases runtime overheads. Rust stands out for its robust memory management, which ensures very few bugs and performance issues for dApps utilizing the language.
Another major benefit of Rust is its vibrant developer community and its expansive ecosystem of tools, which has given birth to a vast ocean of libraries, tools, and other resources to support software development. In an industry as complex as blockchain, you can never have too much help!
Which blockchains implement Rust?
Aleo
Aleo is known as a privacy-focused blockchain network that’s designed to support truly anonymous interactions between users. It does this by integrating a cryptographic technique known as zero-knowledge proofs within programmable smart contracts, giving dApps a way to anonymize users’ transactions and deliver more personalized experiences.
With ZK-proofs, it’s possible for one user to prove to another that it knows the details of a transaction, without revealing the amounts sent or the sender or receiver, making truly private transactions a reality in blockchain.
With its privacy-focused blockchain, Aleo aims to appeal to institutions that demand the utmost secrecy in their business dealings. The use of ZK-proofs is what enables this, but the technology is incredibly complex. So Aleo simplifies it with its specialized programming language, Leo, which is based on Rust.
With Leo, developers can abstract away all of the underlying cryptography, so they can focus on building secure dApps with native ZK-proof capabilities. They don’t need to understand how the ZK-proofs work, which makes the technology far more accessible than before.
In addition to privacy, Aleo also aims to be an extremely high-performance blockchain that can support versatile smart contracts. Leo enables this too, thanks to Rust’s fine-grained control over system resources, which enables it to accelerate transaction times. Leo boasts a lightweight concurrency model and support for multithreading to increase network throughput.
As such, it allows DeFi applications to run at incredibly fast speeds compared to older networks.
Solana
The Solana blockchain was built to address the scalability challenges of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and to that end, its creator, Anatoly Yakovenko, designed a novel Proof-of-History consensus mechanism that leaves those older networks behind in a cloud of dust.
Proof-of-History is the secret sauce that enables Solana to support thousands of transactions per second. It works by creating a timestamped record of blockchain events, removing the need for validators to coordinate and agree on the order of transactions. This dramatically increases its transaction throughput, resulting in a vastly more efficient blockchain.
To support such a blazing-fast network, Solana needed a similarly performant programming language, and Yakovenko quickly came to the conclusion that only Rust would do. He was particularly impressed with Rust’s robust concurrency model, which is necessary to handle thousands of transactions concurrently.
Rust also offers fine-grained control over low-level details, which is particularly useful for writing deterministic code, making Solana less prone to environment-specific variations.
Solana uses Rust to write smart contracts and NFTs, and its memory efficiency and reliability play a key role in facilitating the higher transaction volumes it supports.
Polkadot
Another high-performance blockchain based on Rust is Gavin Wood’s Polkadot, which introduced the concept of multiple “parachains” specifically for each dApp to increase the scalability of its Web3 ecosystem.
Polkadot makes extensive use of Rust. For instance, it serves as the basis of Polkadot’s core runtime for executing smart contracts and transactions, providing extensive safety features and low-level control to minimize risk and boost efficiency.
Rust is also the foundation of many of Polkadot’s ecosystem components. The Substrate framework, which provides a foundation for developing and deploying parachains atop of the Polkadot relay chain, is written in Rust. Substrate is an extensible, modular architecture that allows for each parachain to implement its novel consensus mechanism and link it to Polkadot’s PoS. It also provides a decentralized governance model and supports economic incentives for dApps. Utilizing Rust’s expressive syntax, developers can take full advantage of Substrate’s capabilities to build highly scalable parachains.
Finally, Rust is one of the key facilitators of interoperability between Polkadot and its parachains. Its cross-chain communication model is based on WebAssembly, which is a low-level virtual machine that makes it possible for code to run in different environments, easing interoperability headaches for developers. Rust provides native support for WASM.
Driving blockchain innovation
Rust is a great example of how innovation paves the way for further advances in blockchain, being especially well-suited for dApps that need high performance and concurrency.
It’s especially useful in DeFi applications, where speed and security are of paramount importance to end users. Thanks to Rust, developers can build incredibly sophisticated applications with rapid transaction processing and strong security guarantees. It’s because of Rust that other blockchains, such as Aleo, Solana, and Polkadot, are rapidly building out DeFi ecosystems to rival the one found on Ethereum.
What began life as a simple project to improve the efficiency of an elevator has since emerged as a favorite for blockchain developers. Rust is known for its strong performance and iron-clad security, making it a perfect tool for the creation of highly efficient and decentralized applications.
