Rust turns 10: How a broken elevator changed software forever

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Eric S. Raymond, one of open-source's founders, famously said, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." That was certainly the case with Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla software developer, when he started work on the Rust programming language. In 2006, Hoare was annoyed with his apartment building's elevator that kept breaking down. As he later said, "It's ridiculous that we computer people couldn't even make an elevator that works without crashing!" He suspected it kept breaking down because of memory errors in its control software, which was likely written in C or C++. Both are popular systems languages that are difficult to code in -- in no small part because it's too easy to write semi-functional code with memory errors. Also: The most popular programming languages in 2025 (and what that even means) So Hoare, sick of dragging himself up 21 flights of stairs every day, began designing a new computer language. He wanted ... Read full article.