Rust is a curly-brace, block-structured expression language. It visually resembles the C language family, but differs significantly in syntactic and semantic details. Its design is oriented toward concerns of "programming in the large", that is, of creating and maintaining boundaries - both abstract and operational - that preserve large-system integrity, availability and concurrency.

It supports a mixture of imperative procedural, concurrent actor, object-oriented and pure functional styles. Rust also supports generic programming and meta-programming, in both static and dynamic styles.