Rust is a systems programming language pursuing the trifecta:
safety, which is guaranteed at compile time; fearless
concurrency, which is a lot easier when things are safe; and blazingly fast
speed due to zero-cost abstractions and other nice things. High level scripting languages like Ruby or Python will get you safety but not concurrency or speed. On the other hand, systems languages like C and C++ will give you speed and some access to concurrency, but forget about safety, because they will happily let you shoot yourself in the foot by design.
Rust was started in 2006 as a personal project of a Mozilla employee named Graydon Hoare. Mozilla started sponsoring Rust officially in 2009 and version 1.0 was released in 2015, which makes Rust about five years old after a nine year incubation period. In comparison C++ is about 35 years old, and C is about forty five years old.Mozilla sponsor a systems programming language? Because they were sick of C++ and wanted a better language to program Firefox in. Back in 2017 Firefox quantum was a major update for Firefox browser which make it almost bug free and twice as fast as its predecessors. Today there is about 1.5 million lines of Rust in Firefox.