As a longtime C++ programmer, I had to come around to Rust. Its focus on security is what convinced me of its merits.

In C++, developers have free access to memory. This can bring about buffer overruns and stack overflow vulnerabilities. But with Rust, strong memory safety features preclude these kinds of mistakes.

That means developers see fewer serious security issues and waste less time debugging.

Rust is also high-performing. That’s because of its high security standards — it’s harder to make mistakes — and its low-level code. Rust can match C or C++ in speed, if not surpass them. Rust also does better than Go, Java, and Python.