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Fundamentals·Beginner

Why Rust Exists

A short history of Rust — from a Mozilla research project to the language rewriting the kernel.

February 10, 20268 min read3 viewsUpdated August 9, 2026
#rust#history#systems

You can't really understand Rust without understanding what it was reacting to. Every design decision is scar tissue from decades of C and C++ bugs.

The problem

Roughly 70% of security vulnerabilities in large C/C++ codebases come from memory safety issues: use-after-free, buffer overflows, data races.

Rust in the Linux kernel — a short overview

The bet

Rust bets you can eliminate that entire class of bugs at compile time — without a garbage collector, without runtime overhead — if you teach the compiler about ownership.

Two rules that changed everything

  1. Every value has exactly one owner.
  2. You can have many readers, or one writer — never both.
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