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What can you build with Rust?

Short answer: command-line tools and network services, mostly — Rust won both. Browser code compiled to WebAssembly is the third, and the tooling there is calm. Desktop apps, machine learning and games still belong to someone else.

Command-line tools

Section titled “Command-line tools”

Two examples carry it. ripgrep exists to be faster than grep, ag and ack, and its README says plainly that “ripgrep is written in Rust”. uv, Astral’s Python package manager, is a Rust binary: the docs open with “An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust” and claim “10-100x faster than pip”. Someone rewrote pip’s job in another language because pip was too slow. That’s what “the default” looks like.

Servers

Section titled “Servers”

Cloudflare serves a large share of its traffic from services built on Pingora, a Rust framework it open-sourced, which its announcement says “has handled nearly a quadrillion Internet requests”. Firecracker, the microVM underneath AWS Lambda and Fargate, is Rust too. Discord moved its Read States service from Go to Rust after finding that Go’s garbage collector runs at least once every two minutes whether you need it to or not — users could feel the spikes.

All three share one property: nothing is scheduled to tidy up. Memory is released when the last owner goes out of scope, so a busy server has no collector waiting to pause it.

WebAssembly

Section titled “WebAssembly”

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown is the whole compiler-side setup — the target is already in rustup target list, and cargo emits a .wasm file. wasm-bindgen and wasm-pack write the JavaScript glue. Reach for it for what JavaScript is bad at: parsing, image work, tight loops over big arrays.

Where it isn’t the default

Section titled “Where it isn’t the default”
  • Desktop GUI. Tauri and egui work, and the track here builds a real app, but you’ll spend your time on the pieces the ecosystem hasn’t finished.
  • Machine learning. Python owns the notebook. Rust sits behind the tooling — uv is one — rather than in front of you.
  • Games. The engines are C++ and C#.
  • Kernel code. Linux merged Rust in 6.1, and kernel.org’s documentation still says no in-tree driver is intended for production.

Next

Section titled “Next”