New programming languages come and go. Most of them remain nothing more than academic toys or niche novelties. Rust, development of which is sponsored by Mozilla, might be one of the exceptions. The new language reached the 1.0 milestone today, marking the point at which its feature set is stabilized and developers can start to use it without having to worry too much about their code getting broken by a major change.

Rust is an attempt to offer the performance and control of a language like C or C++, while making it much harder to write the kind of security-compromising bugs that are abundant in those languages. Key to this is the language’s handling of memory and memory management.

Some of the biggest problems with C come from mishandling memory; predominantly reading or writing more data to a block of memory than the block of memory contains, reading or writing from blocks of memory that have been deallocated. Environments such as Java, .NET, and JavaScript handle these through a combination of bounds checking—ensuring that every attempt to read and write memory is constrained to the memory that has been allocated—and garbage collection—ensuring that memory is deallocated only once all the references to the memory (through which reads and writes are performed) are destroyed.