The Rust Language was the winner of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award which recognizes a software system that has had a significant impact and carries a prize of $2500. The award was presented at the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) Conference held last month in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) explores programming language concepts and tools, focusing on design, implementation, practice, and theory. Its members are programming language developers, educators, implementers, researchers, theoreticians, and users.

Since 2010 the Programming Languages Software Award has been awarded annually to an institution or individual(s) to:

recognize the development of a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools. The impact may be reflected in the widespread adoption of the system or its underlying concepts by the wider programming language community either i

n research projects, in the open-source community, or commercially.

Nominations for this award have to be supported by between five and ten people who will be asked for their comments and are the decision is taken by a committee. in this case of five members. of six members.

The citation for Rust reads:

Rust is the first industrial strength programming language to offer a compelling answer to the challenge of being a safe systems programming language: one with fine-grained control over low-level resources while avoiding the security vulnerabilities of unsafe languages. It provides: control over low-level resources via a C-style programming model, with a minimal runtime and avoiding garbage collection for predictable performance; and safety via a type system that systematically eliminates out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-free bugs, and data races. Rust achieves this by embodying innovations from academic PL research—linear/affine types, ownership types, traits—combined with usable standard libraries. Born out of many years of research and experimentation, Rust tackles the real-world challenges and issues needed for practical adoption. Rust has been recognized as one of a handful of Safer Languages by NIST, and is increasingly deployed in industry for its safety benefits by large and small companies alike.

The nominated contributors are: Aaron Turon, Alex Crichton, Brian Anderson, Dave Herman, Felix S. Klock II, Graydon Hoare, Marijn Haverbeke, Nicholas D. Matsakis, Patrick Walton, Tim Chevalier, Yehuda Katz and All Rust Contributors Past and Present. 

Previous winners of this award include OCML (2023); WebAssembly (2021); Scala (2019); Racket (2018) and, as we reported at the time, the GNU Compiler Collection (2014).

I Programmer has followed Rust from its beginnings when  we characterized it as:

a curly-brace, block-structured expression language that looks similar to C and C++

and had been designed:

with the aim of giving developers ways to write code that behaves well in large and concurrent systems.

explaining that the original design of Rust was by developer Graydon Hoare, though later work had been carried out by Mozilla.

Rust reached its first stable version in 2015 and has seen many releases since then. The language could have faced a setback as a result of the two sets of Mozilla layoffs in 2020, the second of which saw it axe Servo, a project to create a Rust rendering engine. However by this time Rust was strong enough to thrive without reliance on Mozilla and within a few months had formed a foundation to oversee its governance that included AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla as its founding member companies.

In Stack Overflow's Developer surveys Rust stands out as a language that, despite being used by a relatively small number of developers, is one that is very well loved by users and one that developers who don't use it are keen to try out.

Having repeatedly explored the idea of Rust being a safe language, recently we examined the claim that it was twice as productive as C++, concluding that the claim seemed reasonable.

All-in-all Rust deserves this recognition.

More Information

Programming Languages Software Award

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