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Why scientists are turning to Rust

Despite having a steep learning curve, the programming language offers speed and safety.
  1. Jeffrey M. Perkel
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Cartoon of a person in a safety helmet travelling fast whilst sitting in front of a laptop made up of symbols of code. Illustration by The Project Twins

In 2015, bioinformatician Johannes Köster was what he called “kind of a full-time Python guy”. He had already written one popular tool — the workflow manager Snakemake — in the programming language. Now he was contemplating a project that required a level of computational performance that Python simply couldn’t deliver. So he began casting about for something new.

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Nature 588, 185-186 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03382-2

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 02 December 2020: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong source for the graphic.

  • Correction 11 December 2020: An earlier version of this feature erred in stating that the Clippy plug-in is a third-party component.

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