Rust

Yes. Rust is distributed under the MIT license and Apache-2.0 license, both of which permit unrestricted commercial use, modification, and redistribution. There are no licensing fees or per-seat costs for using or building on Rust.

Rust uses an ownership model enforced by the borrow checker at compile time. Each value has exactly one owner, and references must not outlive the data they point to. The compiler rejects code that violates these rules, eliminating use-after-free errors and data races before the program runs. Memory is freed deterministically when the owning variable goes out of scope.

Cargo is Rust's built-in package manager and build tool. It handles dependency resolution, compilation, testing, and documentation generation for Rust projects. Libraries for Rust, called crates, are published on crates.io. Cargo serves a similar role to npm for Node.js or pip for Python, but it is integrated into the language toolchain from the start rather than a separately installed tool.

Yes. Rust has first-class support for bare-metal embedded targets including ARM Cortex-M and RISC-V, as noted in the official website's embedded section. Firmware can be written using the no_std attribute to exclude the standard library. The same compile-time memory safety guarantees apply to embedded code, and the Rust community maintains board support crates and hardware abstraction layers for common microcontrollers.

No. Memory in Rust is managed entirely by the ownership system at compile time. When a value's owner goes out of scope, the memory is freed immediately with no garbage collector involved. This makes Rust suitable for latency-sensitive systems and real-time applications where GC pauses are unacceptable, and for embedded targets where a GC runtime would be too large.