When I first started building systems-level software, I reached for C. It felt like the natural choice — close to the metal, fast, and with decades of battle-tested libraries. But after spending a few months fighting segfaults and undefined behavior, I started looking for alternatives.
The ownership model
Rust’s ownership system is the thing that makes it unique. At first, it feels like the compiler is fighting you. Every borrow, every lifetime annotation, every move — it all feels unnecessarily strict.
But here’s the thing: the compiler is catching real bugs. The kind of bugs that would show up at 3am in production as a use-after-free or a data race. Once you internalize the ownership model, you start writing code that is correct by construction.
fig 001. How Rust's ownership and borrowing model manages memory at compile time.
fn process_data(data: Vec<u8>) -> Result<Vec<u8>, Error> {
let mut buffer = data;
// The compiler guarantees exclusive access here
transform(&mut buffer)?;
Ok(buffer)
}Performance without compromise
One of the things I love about Rust is that you don’t have to choose between safety and performance. The zero-cost abstractions mean that high-level constructs like iterators and closures compile down to the same machine code you’d write by hand.
When I built P2rent, a peer-to-peer file transfer tool on QUIC, the performance was on par with C implementations — but the code was significantly easier to reason about and maintain.
The ecosystem
Cargo is genuinely the best package manager I’ve used. Coming from the fragmented world of C/C++ build systems (CMake, Makefiles, autoconf), having a single tool that handles dependencies, building, testing, and documentation is a breath of fresh air.
The crate ecosystem has matured enormously. Libraries like tokio for async runtime, serde for serialization, and rayon for data parallelism are production-grade and well-maintained.
fig 002. The Rust compilation pipeline from source to machine code.
The learning curve is real
I won’t sugarcoat it — Rust has a steep learning curve. The borrow checker will humble you. Lifetimes will confuse you. And the first time you try to build a self-referential struct, you’ll question your life choices.
But the payoff is worth it. After about three months of consistent use, the ownership model becomes second nature. You start thinking about memory and concurrency in a way that makes you a better programmer in any language.
When not to use Rust
Rust isn’t the right tool for everything. For quick scripts, Python is still faster to write. For web frontends, JavaScript/TypeScript is the pragmatic choice. And for some embedded targets, C is still the only realistic option.
But for systems programming — databases, networking, CLI tools, operating systems — Rust is my default choice, and it’s been serving me well.