Rust

Rust
Programming Language
Company	Mozilla
Influences	C++, Erlang, Haskell, Standard ML
Updated	2013-07-03 (0.7)
Status	Beta
Licensing	Open Source (MIT License)
Platforms	Linux, OS X, Windows, FreeBSD
Official site of Rust

Rust is a systems programming language from Mozilla Research. It is aiming to be a viable replacement for C++ and used by Mozilla to write a next-generation web browser engine. Unlike most high-level programming languages that use garbage collection, Rust uses the scope-delimited memory management idiom of C++ with stronger enforcement at language level. It uses an abstraction idiom similar to Haskell's type classes instead of OO, and supports reasonably extensive generic programming with type parameters that can be constrained to implemented traits. It has a macro system. Values can be specifically annotated to be garbage collected, and then work as values in a GC language. The standard library does not require the GC system.

The language and type system have been designed to make it impossible to create memory leaks or null pointer references unless you really try, while maintaining C++-style explicit memory handling. The cost for this is a somewhat complex core language, with several pointer types, separate annotations for explicit value lifetimes and so on.

Writing FFI bindings to C code is easy. The language comes with its own build system and unit testing framework.