Rust started in 2006 as a personal project of Graydon Hoare, then a Mozilla employee. Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009 and announced it in 2010 as a systems language that is as fast as C and C++ but safe from memory errors. Instead of a garbage collector, Rust checks ownership and borrowing at compile time, which rules out whole classes of bugs such as use-after-free and data races.
Rust 1.0 shipped on 15 May 2015 with a stability promise, and a new stable release has followed every six weeks since. Larger changes arrive through editions (2015, 2018, 2021 and 2024), which crates can opt into without breaking each other. Firefox adopted Rust components in 2017, the independent Rust Foundation was formed in 2021 by AWS, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla, and Linux 6.1 merged initial support for writing kernel code in Rust at the end of 2022.