Rust is a general purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Research. It is designed to be a "safe, concurrent, practical language", supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles. The language grew out of a personal project by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009 and announced it for the first time in 2010. The same year, work shifted from the initial compiler (written in OCaml) to the self-hosted compiler written in Rust itself. Known as rustc, it successfully compiled itself in 2011. The self-hosted compiler uses LLVM as its backend.