Rust is a general-purpose programming language developed as a community project, the Rust Project, and maintained by the Rust Team; companies support the project through the Rust Foundation. Rust has no runtime and no garbage collector (a background process that frees unused memory), so it suits performance-critical services, embedded devices and code that must integrate with other languages.
Its type system and ownership model, the rules that decide which part of the code owns each piece of memory and when that memory is freed, guarantee memory safety and thread safety and remove many classes of bugs at compile time. The toolchain includes Cargo, the package manager and build system; an auto-formatter; editor support with auto-completion; and a compiler with useful error messages. Libraries are called crates. Official learning material includes the book The Rust Programming Language, Rust by Example and the Rustlings course. Common uses are command-line tools, WebAssembly modules, network services and embedded software.
Rust is free and open source: the language and its official projects are generally dual-licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and the MIT license.