Rust
A systems programming language that combines C-level performance with memory safety guarantees — increasingly used in infrastructure, WebAssembly, and performance-critical backend services.
Rust is a systems programming language that achieves C and C++ level performance without a garbage collector, while enforcing memory safety at compile time through its ownership and borrowing system. This eliminates entire categories of bugs — null pointer dereferences, buffer overflows, data races — that plague C/C++ codebases. Rust has been the most-admired programming language in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for eight consecutive years. It is used at Cloudflare, Discord, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Mozilla, and is being adopted in the Linux kernel, Windows, and Android. Rust roles are niche but command among the highest engineering salaries.
Typical time to job-readiness: ~6 months.
Learning Rust
Beginner
The Rust Book (doc.rust-lang.org/book) is the authoritative free resource — read it cover to cover before anything else. Work through Rustlings (small exercises) to get hands-on with ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes — these concepts are non-negotiable and unlike anything in other languages.
Intermediate
Async Rust with Tokio for building web services (Axum is the modern choice), error handling with the ? operator and thiserror/anyhow, traits and generics, and working with the Cargo ecosystem. Build something real — a REST API or CLI tool — to feel the borrow checker in a production-like context.
Advanced
Unsafe Rust and FFI for interfacing with C libraries, WebAssembly compilation with wasm-pack, lock-free data structures, and writing zero-copy parsers. Rust interviews are rare but technically demanding — interviewers expect you to explain ownership decisions and discuss when to reach for Arc<Mutex<T>> vs other patterns.
Key concepts
- Ownership: each value has one owner; dropping the owner frees memory — no GC needed
- Borrowing: references let you use values without taking ownership; & is immutable, &mut is mutable
- Lifetimes: annotations that tell the compiler how long references are valid — mostly inferred
- The borrow checker: compile-time enforcement that prevents use-after-free, data races, and null dereferences
- Traits: Rust's interface mechanism; define behavior that types must implement (like interfaces + typeclasses)
- Error handling with Result<T, E>: explicit propagation with ? operator; no exceptions
Common interview topics
- Explain Rust's ownership system — what problem does it solve
- What is the difference between borrowing and moving in Rust
- When would you use Arc<Mutex<T>> and what are the alternatives
- How does Rust achieve memory safety without garbage collection
- What are lifetimes and when do you need to annotate them explicitly