Smart Contracts with Rust Salaries and Rates in 2024

Smart Contracts with Rust

Rust: A Language Overview

Rust was built to provide performance – like C and C++ provide – but with focus on code safety, which is the Achilles heel of the other two. Not only that. High performance in processing large amounts of data, support for concurrent programming, and all that with a good compiler in your corner; these reasons count and make software juggernauts take notice. Rust is now being used for production by Firefox, Dropbox, Cloudflare, and numerous startups and enterprise companies. You can read here about Rust’s key tenets, what programs can do with it, and why it might be worth having insight into it in order to build software.

Rust’s Growing Popularity

In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022 (a poll of more than 80,000 developers), Rust is the most loved language – and has won the category for the seventh year running. And in 2020, proposing an initiative to begin writing new Linux kernel components – that is, code not related to updating the Kernel or rewriting parts of it – in Rust. To be clear: they don’t mean rewriting the entire Kernel, entirely in Rust, which would be a titanic task, considering Linux’s original Kernel, written in C, has over 23 million lines of code as of 2019.

They simply want to write new code, in Rust, that plays well with the existing Linux infrastructure. Linus Thorvalds himself, the father of the open source operating system Linux, is enthusiastic, and is excited to see the results. The initiative is ongoing – at the time of writing, its iteration is described as still experimental, ‘good enough that kernel developers can start working on Rust abstractions for subsystems and write drivers and other modules’. At the same time, even more globally, Google is preparing to use Rust in the Linux kernel.

Having brought support for the low-level programming language Rust to Android, the entire operation is being carried out in the name of increasing the number of security bugs. Microsoft in turn turned to Rust to reduce memory bugs in Windows components. Facebook has also been getting closer to Rust, and is now a member of the Rust Foundation, a non-profit association formed in 2021 that seeks to promote and support Rust so that it can become ‘a systems language of choice’ beyond its traditional confines. Along with Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla, Facebook now uses Rust in some way or another.

All these are markers of something that has been gaining traction in the past few years: the rise of the Rust language. But can Rust survive the typical fate of a hyped technology – some technological equivalent of Crazy Eddie sloganeering about ‘bitsy prices’ – or will it merely be a passing fad?

What is so Special About Rust Language?

Statically-typed and appeasing to purist ideals of performance and safety – particularly, safe concurrency and memory management – Rust’s syntax is akin to that of C++. Rust was originally an open-source project at Mozilla Research, with the Rust Foundation taking the torch since 2021.

Rust solves problems C/C++ developers have grappled with for decades: memory errors and concurrent programming By all accounts, this is what makes Rust worth a closer look. But it isn’t the only way Rust differs from C++. Needless to say, modern C++ at best does more to encourage memory safety (eg via ‘smart’ pointers) but quite a lot of problems remain unresolved: eg, ‘use after free’ errors, use of the pointer after it has been freed (eg, still calling the lambda function after the objects that it captured by reference have been freed). However, with Rust you get the borrow checker – the part of the compiler that keeps references around only as long as a piece of data. You get the ability to remove bugs related to memory violations.

Compile time! No garbage collection needed. Further, Rust provides a lifetime for each reference, and you must define the scope within which the reference remains valid. That way, the compiler can catch invalid references – and that’s the other thing that drives Rust crazy: unlike C or C++, you can’t create a reference to something that’s no longer valid. You soon realise the value of getting memory management right when you find that over the past 12 years more than 70 per cent of all security bugs in Microsoft products, and in Google Chrome, correspond to memory safety problems, respectively.

Rust programs can be written in two styles, Safe Rust and Unsafe Rust. Safe Rust puts more restrictions on the programmer (eg, making sure that objects are properly owned by another object), so that the code will not misbehave, whereas Unsafe Rust puts less restrictions on the programmer (eg, letting you work with raw C-style pointers), but then that code can break. In the unsafe Rust mode Each abstraction in Rust is safely designed. Each use of A results in safe code, meaning that it will always do what the author of A intended.

However, unsafe Rust adds the possibility of crashing by making abstractions that allow you to access low-level memory. When you switch to unsafe mode, you need to take care to run code that is safe because the types and compiler no longer guarantee safety. You can still achieve this by wrapping it with higher-level abstractions that themselves will enforce this safety via the fact that each use of the abstraction is safe. As with all unsafe programming, the use of unsafe code involves care, to avoid undefined behaviour, and thus to reduce the likelihood of segfaults and memory unsafety bugs (vulnerabilities). Its most important feature, in fact, is that Rust is a dual-mode language.

In C++, you never know that you’ve written unsafe code until, sometime later, your software crashes, or a security breach suddenly rears up. Concurrent programming made easier But rust also makes it much easier to write concurrent programs by catching potential data races at compile time. A data race is when at least two different instructions of different threads access the same memory location at the same time, and at least one of them tries to write something and there is no synchronisation that can put any specific order on the various accesses. Access without synchronisation is undefined. Rust will flag dataraces. If a given access to an object doesn’t support many threads (eg, it’s not marked with the appropriate trait), that access needs to be ‘fenced off’ with a mutex: a mechanism that will lock access to that object for other threads; only one thread at a time will be able to have access to an object in order for operations performed on that object to remain valid.

Operations on this object are atomic from the perspective of other threads, which is Programmer-speak for ‘if you notice a particular state of this object, you will see a state where this object really is in that state, and you will never see the object in an intermediate state resulting from an operation performed by this object by another thread.’ Rust will tell us at compile time whether we’re doing anything wrong with one of these objects.

Other languages use synchronisation mechanisms that are not attached to the thing that they refer to. It is the developer who must take care to lock the object before using it. In C, a compiler can let a developer write buggy code. This can result in finding bugs after a program is already in production – or worse, while someone is hacking it. Many of the problems encountered in writing concurrent programs in Rust lang are detected immediately at compile time.

Tools and Libraries for Rust Development

Any developer has learned the hard way that, if you want to effectively exploit a technology or solve a problem using a specific tool, you need to be intimately familiar with your own toolbox. The solutions below represent a starting point for Rust that could make it even more speedy and enjoyable to work with.

Rust Tools

• Rustup – a command-line tool that manages Rust installations on your system, Rustup helps you install new versions of Rust, switch between them, and update existing installations.
• Cargo – The official Rust package manager and build tool. This is the tool that manages your Rust package (a project which can be made up of multiple Rust packages), its dependencies, how it gets built, tested, and packaged. For day-to-day Rust work, Cargo automates many things, such as registering the libraries your project depends on, and publishing your own Rust packages to crates.io.
• Rustfmt – instantly formats Rust code to follow the conventions of the Rust community. It can correct formatting mistakes so you stay within the Rust community’s best practices, and will make your code easy to read and maintain.
• Clippy – a Rust linter – a tool used to analyse the code and suggest fixes. It can help to avoid bugs, improve performance or just help you to write better Rust code. Clippy is configurable, even obsessively so, so its suggestions are a good fit if you have a preference for any of them.

Rust Libraries and Frameworks

• Actix – a blazingly fast, actor-based web framework. It is meant exactly for providing fast and scalable web applications using the guarantees of safety and performance provided by Rust.With Actix you can utilise the actor-based concurrency model that can in many cases make your web applications more scalable and free up the blocks that actors can become given enough concurrency.
• Rocket is a web framework for Rust meant to facilitate a safe, secure, and intuitive development experience. It offers a set of user-friendly macros and abstractions (underpinned by the sane and safe type system of Rust) to ease web development, featuring in particular easy-to-use request routing and response handling.
• Serde – A Rust library for fast, reliable, extensible serialisation and deserialisation of Rust data structures to and from a wide variety of data formats: JSON, TOML, YAML, etc.Serde is a library that writes and reads arbitrary data types to and from data formats such as JSON, TOML, YAML, etc. Written in Rust, Serde is “fast, reliable, pretty extensible” and suitable for custom data formats.
• Diesel – a Type-safe, high-performance and composable ORM (object-relational mapping) and query builder.You can write away all your fire-breathing and goal is achieved! All these tools are very popular, useful and used in the Rust ecosystem, and can certainly ease your Rust application development.

Obstacles to Overcome While Programming in Rust

Of course, there are downsides: Rust is a young technology, so any library you might need might not yet exist. However, while the Rust package library crates.io has grown only since 2016, the active community of Rust co-developers is a very good sign, and it will likely keep the welding torch hot for the technology. Other than that, though, and despite the fact that errors in Rust code can be picked up at compile time (which for developers not used to it is an annoyance, because it can generate multiple error messages at once), developing in it is not as fast as in tastes-like-sugar languages such as Python.

That’s why Rust’s developers are making sure to make the errors as informative and actionable as possible. Irritating as it might be to get so many error messages when coding, think big picture: with compile-time memory safety guarantees, you eliminate bugs and security vulnerabilities from the start, when that software might already be in production. Fixing them there is going to set you back in nerve and cash alike. Finally, it is just more work to write Rust (as the approach itself implies, the threshold is high).

You need to put some time into learning the language, and a basic understanding of C++ or another object-oriented programming language is a good prerequisite. But if you can get over all these hurdles, the advantages of the Rust experience will be the best reward to all your hard work. You can also read a comparison between Rust vs Go.

What is Rust Used For?

But rust is certainly not bleeding-edge: it is already production-ready technology. As a system-level language, with low-level control, you can decide whether to allocate data on the stack (static memory) or on the heap (dynamic memory). You’ll no doubt also be familiar with the resource acquisition is initialisation (RAII – this focusing device is widely used in C++) idiom, which is also present in Rust, though most often associated with C++: the destructor of any object that goes out of scope will be called, so that you don’t need to take responsibility for freeing its owned resources. You are safe from resource leakage bugs. In the end, this allows memory to be used more efficiently.

Tilde ended up using Rust for Skylight, their product for rewriting, to rewrite a select set of Java HTTP endpoints, reducing their memory usage from 5 GiB to 50 MiB. Because Rust doesn’t have a background daemon running a garbage collector, projects from that ecosystem can interface with other languages through FFIs, a convenient situation in the context of the existing projects where shaving crucial milliseconds needs to be balanced against ensuring memory safety. Rust code can replace sections of a product that rely on performance when a FFI is set up to interface with other language code that does not have to optimise for performance.

Rust is a low-level language with direct access to hardware and memory — which makes it an ideal choice for embedded and bare-metal development (you can use Rust to write anything from an operation system to an application for a microcontroller). Indeed, there are multiple operating systems written in Rust — Redox, intermezzOS, QuiltOS, Rux, Tock — and even Mozilla (where the language was originally designed) uses it in its browser engines. Performance and security were the features that attracted scientists to the language, who quickly started writing code for heavy computational tasks.

As something extremely fast, it turned out to be perfect for computational biology and machine learning, computational tasks that require to process a significant amount of data in a very short amount of time. At CodiLime, we are exploring to see if, in network scenarios with a need for high data throughput, Rust can replace C for performance. We wrote a PoC in Rust that leverages DPDK libraries written in C to enable performance while also adding memory safety.

Types of Applications That Can Be Written with Rust

Rust can be used for many kinds of applications. Still, in some areas this programming language is populating particularly quickly. Be sure to see for which application types and industry areas Rust might be the right choice.

System-level Programming

• Operating systems (OS): Its relative low-level control, efficiency and guarantees on safe memory access (known as ‘memory safety’, and a hallmark of languages such as Rust, which prevents things such as undefined behaviour where a program might read or write to a nonexistent slot in memory) make it well-suited to operating system design.
• Device drivers: It’s a good fit for device driver code because of Rust’s low-level control, performance and memory safety. Its type system and borrow checker make it easier to write safe and efficient device drivers with well-defined ownership rules that map nicely to the underlying hardware.
• Embedded systems: This language is also becoming used for embedded systems because of features like great low-level control and performance. Due to Rust’s borrow checker, it provides safe memory management and guarantees no null pointer dereferencing hazard – all without sacrificing safety.

Web Development

• Backend services: Here, everything else pales in contrast to Rust in terms of performance, scalability and safety; its async/await support makes it easy to have concurrency for building high-performance backend services.
• Web applications: Notably, Rust is a popular option for web applications because its fast memory management makes it possible to write high-performance, memory-safe applications.

Data Science

• High-performance computing: The Rust architecture for parallelism and its async/await pattern makes it possible to build fast and safe parallel programs.
• Machine learning (ML): While it’s not the most commonly used language for ML projects so far, it does have some support in the form of libraries like rusty-machine and tch-rs that can help you train machine learning models.

Why Use Rust

In a nutshell, here are the reasons why you should give Rust a try in your next software project:

• High performance while ensuring memory safety.
• Support for concurrent programming.
• The growing number of Rust packages at crates.io repository.
• A vibrant community driving the development of the language.
• Backwards compatibility and stability ensured (Rust has been designed for the next 40 years).

What Is a Smart Contract?

It would be the self-executing program that gets us to do whatever is necessary to conclude an agreement or contract. Once it is completed, the record of transactions is logged and no reversal in activity is possible. Think of a vending machine – put in the right amount of money and hit the button for your item and the program (I like to think of it as a smart contract) turns on that machine to dispense the desired item.

Smart contracts let trusted transactions and agreements be executed among distributed, anonymous parties without some central authority, judicial system, or other external mechanisms needed to enforce the rules.

History of Smart Contracts

Nick Szabo, a US-born computer scientist who created a Bitcoin-like form of currency called ‘Bit Gold’ a decade before Bitcoin was invented, was the first to suggest smart contracts in 1994. He defined smart contracts as ‘digital mechanisms which perform the terms of a contract’.

Some of Szabo’s predictions are ones that we will take for granted in the seemingly near future, but which were not taken up at the time of publication of his paper, because the technology, essentially the distributed ledger, was not available.

The blockchain technology of Satoshi Nakamoto was published in a dated whitepaper in 2008 with Bitcoin – they could henceforth never be referenced in another block. Five years later, the emergence of sophisticated technologies themselves became the trigger for the growing smart contract era. One blockchain block could not be referenced in another one After five years, the Ethereum blockchain platform implemented smart contracts useable in practice. Ethereum remains one of the most popular platforms for implementing smart contracts today.

Smart Contract Uses

Since they encode agreements, smart contracts can be used for just about anything. One of the simplest pacts is to ensure contractual performance between two parties: if I send you something, you send me the payment. Let’s say a manufacturer needs a large shipment of raw materials and the supplier is demanding payment upfront. Both parties have to trust the other won’t swindle them. So, the manufacturing company sets up the payments in smart contracts, while the supplier sets up the shipment. Then the terms of the agreement – however the two businesses decide them – ensure that the money goes to the supplier after shipment or delivery.

Smart contracts could be used to conduct real estate transactions or stock and commodity trades, to settle loans or implement corporate governance mechanisms, and to handle supply-chain contracts or even arbitrate dispute resolution or healthcare scenarios.

Smart Contract Pros and Cons

The main advantage of smart contracts is analogous to the advantage embedded in the blockchain: they cut out the middleman. Other benefits of the technology are:

• Efficiency: They speed up contract execution
• Accuracy: There can be no human error introduced
• Immutability: The programming cannot be altered

Some of the downfalls of smart contracts are:

• Permanent: They cannot be changed if there are mistakes
• Human factor: They rely on you (the programmer) to get the code right so that the intended actions will indeed be executed!
• Holes: There are small openings in the code that present an opportunity for bad-faith contracts to be executed.

Why Do We Use Rust to Develop Smart Contracts?

Rust, an other system-programming language that promises safety guarantees, is a great example of that. Development in Rust is attracting developers who want to build safe and efficient smart contracts, such as those on blockchain.

Why Rust?

• Memory Safety: Rust’s ownership system ensures that there are no null pointer dereferences, dangling pointers or buffer overflows – all common vulnerabilities in smart contract development.
• Concurrency: Rust’s concurrency guarantees allow for smart contracts to be executed at high speeds, especially across multiple transactions.
• Performance: Being a compiled language, Rust guarantees performance similar to C and C++, which is a must for smart contracts that need to execute as quickly as possible.

The Rust Advantage

• Type System: According to Rust’s website: ‘The type system catches so many errors at compile‑time that there are usually very few opportunities to make a mistake at runtime, when it is often too late. Blockchains tend to be fallible, and too many mistakes will lead to catastrophe.
• Immutable By Default: All variables in Rust are immutable by default. This reflects the belief that (immutable) data once written to the blockchain should never be written over.
• Pattern Matching: Rust’s pattern matching is incredibly powerful. For example, smart contracts that accept requests of various types can benefit greatly from this Rust feature.
• Rich Standard Library: The standard library in Rust offers a large number of facilities, as minimal as possible dependencies and allowing users to include many functionalities without bringing in external dependencies can be a real lifesaver, especially in smart contracts where we’re always looking to reduce dependencies and write more secure code.

Rust’s Ecosystem for Blockchain

Rust is a fast-growing ecosystem with libraries and frameworks designed for blockchain development:

• Wasm: Rust has first-class support for WebAssembly (Wasm), a binary instruction set that web browsers can execute. Most new blockchains use Wasm for smart contract execution, making Rust a good fit.
• Software libraries: Rust’s package manager, Cargo, and its package registry, Crates.io, offer a smorgasbord of useful libraries that do everything from lifting cryptography to lifting data structures out of CSVs and into memory.
• Free Community Support: Rust has a very helpful community of people active in discord, forums and other resources who are happy to help you if you are trying to create software using Rust for your first blockchain project.

Rust in Blockchain A number of blockchain platforms have also begun to support, or even recommend, Rust for smart contract development:

• Parity’s Substrate: a framework for developers to create their own blockchains, also has native Rust support.
• NEAR Protocol: Offers a Rust SDK for building smart contracts.
• Solana: Encourages the use of Rust for developing on its platform.

Challenges and Considerations

What I’ve said so far about Rust, though, is incredibly positive stuff. What makes Rust hard to learn? The ownership and borrowing system is designed to provide memory safety, making it one of the things Rust is particularly known for – but it’s not an easy concept to wrap your head around for someone new to the language. Where Nova is concerned, though, whatever time is spent to learn these things should be more than worth it in order to have smart contracts that are both secure and fast. Furthermore, whereas Rust provides many safety guarantees to the programmer, smart contract programmers must still worry about logic errors, reentrancy attacks and other vulnerabilities inherent to the blockchain.

Conclusion

As the blockchain industry booms, so do the tools and languages available for software development. Rust’s novel features and rapidly growing ecosystem make it a candidate to dominate the next generation of smart contracts. With its memory safety and speed, Rust is a powerful tool for either the veteran blockchain developer or blockchain newbie looking to build the decentralised future.