The Oxide Programming Language

Welcome to The Oxide Programming Language, an introductory book about Oxide.

Oxide is an alternative syntax for Rust that provides familiar Swift/Kotlin-inspired conventions while producing identical binary output to equivalent Rust code. It maintains all of Rust's safety guarantees, ownership model, and performance while making systems programming more accessible.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for developers transitioning from Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript, or C# who want to leverage Rust's performance and safety guarantees without navigating its unfamiliar syntax.

How to Use This Book

This book follows the same structure as The Rust Programming Language book. If you're already familiar with Rust, you can skip to the specific chapters that cover Oxide's syntax differences.

Rust Syntax Fallbacks (Important)

Oxide intentionally changes parts of Rust's grammar. Those Rust spellings are syntax errors in Oxide code (for example, ::, =>, and let mut). However, when there is no Oxide-specific alternative and no conflict with Oxide syntax, Oxide accepts Rust syntax as a compatibility fallback. Examples include try { }, const { }, impl Trait in return position, async move { }, and Rust-style macros like format!.

Rust's Option<T>, Some, and None are also accepted for interop, but idiomatic Oxide uses T? and null.