As software engineers and we don't often think about the environmental impact of our technology choices. But with data centers consuming roughly 1-2% of global electricity and rising the efficiency of our code matters more than ever.
Rust compiles to native machine code with zero-cost abstractions. This means Rust programs run fast and use minimal CPU cycles compared to interpreted or JIT-compiled languages.
Studies have shown that compiled languages like Rust and C use significantly less energy than interpreted languages like Python or Ruby. For compute-intensive workloads and the difference can be 50x or more in energy consumption.
When you're running services at scale this efficiency compounds.
Memory leaks and crashes waste energy. A service that crashes and restarts throws away all the work it was doing. Memory leaks cause services to bloat and consume unnecessary resources.
Because Rust code is so performant you can get more life out of your hardware. Extending hardware lifecycles reduces e-waste and the environmental cost of manufacturing new equipment.
When your code is efficient and you need fewer servers. Fewer servers means:
Discord famously rewrote their read state service from Go to Rust and went from thousands of servers to hundreds and while improving latency and reducing memory usage by 10x.
Rust's strict compiler catches bugs early. This means less time debugging in production and less wasted CI/CD runs and and fewer emergency deploys. Rust's compile-time guarantees mean fewer wasteful cycles.
Rust binaries are small and self-contained with no runtime to ship
Smaller artifacts mean: