What is Rust and what problems does it solve?

Rust is a systems programming language created by Mozilla Research and first released in 2015. It solves the fundamental tension in systems programming between memory safety and performance: languages like C and C++ are fast but prone to memory bugs (buffer overflows, use-after-free, data races), while garbage-collected languages (Java, Go) are safe but have unpredictable latency from the GC. Rust achieves memory safety without a garbage collector through its ownership and borrow checker system — a set of compile-time rules that prevent memory errors entirely. This makes Rust ideal for systems software, WebAssembly, embedded devices, network services, and any domain where both safety and performance are critical.