Building system tools has always been a task dominated by C and C++. For decades, these languages offered near-unbeatable performance and direct hardware access. The problem is that this power comes with huge responsibility: managing memory manually, avoiding segmentation faults, preventing buffer overflows, and ensuring multiple threads don't access the same data concurrently in an unsafe manner.
In small projects, this can be manageable. In larger applications, however, complexity grows rapidly, and a significant portion of development time is spent preventing bugs that are difficult to reproduce.
This is precisely why I chose Rust.
Rust delivers performance equivalent to C and C++, but introduces an ownership and borrowing system that eliminates an entire class of bugs at compile time. Instead of discovering memory issues after the program is in production, the compiler simply blocks compilation.
This model completely changes the way low-level software is developed.
The Flux Project
While developing Flux, my Linux file manager written in Rust using GTK4 and Relm4, I quickly realized how much of a difference these guarantees make.
While implementing directory reading operations, file system monitoring, and GUI updates, I could focus entirely on the application logic without the constant worry of invalid pointers, use-after-free, or data races.
This doesn't mean Rust eliminates all complexity. There is a steep learning curve, especially to understand the ownership system. However, once these concepts click, they cease to be an obstacle and begin functioning as an excellent, full-time code reviewer.
Key Takeaways with GTK4 and Relm4
Reactive Architecture
Relm4 uses a state-driven architecture that makes code highly organized.
The interface is no longer a collection of scattered callbacks; instead, it reacts automatically to the application's state changes. For anyone who has worked with React, Vue, or Elm, the philosophy is very familiar.
This separation of state, messages, and view updates makes maintenance much easier as the project grows.
Fearless Concurrency
Another key feature that caught my attention was how easy it is to run tasks in parallel.
Potentially time-consuming operations, such as listing directories with thousands of files, can be executed in separate threads while keeping the UI responsive.
The most interesting part is that the compiler prevents various types of concurrency errors before the application even runs. This drastically reduces the chance of encountering those intermittent bugs that only show up under specific conditions.
Is It Worth Learning Rust?
In my opinion, yes.
Rust is not the easiest language to get started with. The compiler is demanding, and at first, it might feel like it is "fighting" you all the time.
After some time, however, it becomes clear that this rigidity exists precisely to prevent issues that, in other languages, might only appear months later in production.
For anyone building system tools, Linux applications, CLI utilities, servers, or any software where performance and reliability are paramount, Rust offers a combination that is hard to find in other languages: speed, memory safety, and safe concurrency, all without relying on a garbage collector.
Today, for these kinds of projects, I would hardly choose any other language.