Just What Is Rust, Anyway?

Any why does everything say it's hard? Every mainstream language fits a mental slot. C is a systems language. Python is a runtime ecosystem that excels at orchestration. JavaScript is a browser language that escaped into the server. Rust doesn't fit the usual slots either, but for different reasons than Python. Where Python is hard to classify because it does so many things loosely, Rust is hard to classify because it does one thing with unusual rigour. Developers who haven't used it have heard the same three adjectives: fast, safe, and difficult. That specific combination is not accidental, and understanding why those three things travel together is the key to understanding what Rust actually is. This piece is the third in a series. The first article argued that Python is best understood as a runtime ecosystem rather than a language with a clean output artefact. The second argued that C's importance derives not from the language itself but from the ABI — the universal binary interface