Microsoft Gets Rusty: Thoughts on Rust Adoption and C/C++ Departure¶
| rust | thoughts | video |
Today, I watched a video titled “Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges” by Mark Russinovich (uploaded 2025-02-26).
It triggered some thoughts about the adoption of Rust at Microsoft, Big Tech, side stepping from C/C++, and avoiding the corporate “not invented here” (NIH) syndrome (speaking about programming language).
First, I highly recommend watching the video, it’s worth the time.
Key points from the video summarized in Mark Russinovich tweet (written on September 19, 2022):
“Speaking of languages, it’s time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-garbage-collected (GC) language is required. For the sake of security and reliability. the industry should declare those languages as deprecated.”
Microsoft:
- is using Rust in production
- donated $1M to Fund Key Rust Foundation & Project Priorities
- is hiring Rust developers
- open-sourced several Rust projects (see below)
- gradually moving from C/C++ to Rust
Mark Russinovich said at the end:
- Community: “The Rust community is what makes a language popular.”
- Rust is Mature Enough: “We’re over 10 years into Rust, and you know, we’re finally ready - because it takes a long time for a language to mature, for the tooling to mature - and we’re not even completely done with maturing the Rust toolchain.”
- High Bar for New Languages: “Anybody that wants to come along at this point and disrupt something that’s already as good as Rust has a very high hill to climb. So I don’t see anything replacing Rust anytime soon.”
It’s impressive to see how open-minded Microsoft has become in recent years. Instead of investing in an incremental improvement like Carbon, they are embracing a community-driven language and actively migrating core projects to Rust.
Time will tell how this strategy unfolds, but the direction is certainly worth watching.
Open Source Projects¶
Mentioned in the video
- openvmm OpenVMM is a modular, cross-platform Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM)
- hyperlight Hyperlight is a lightweight Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) designed to be embedded within applications
- rustls-symcrypt symcrypt crypto provider for rustls
- azure-sdk-for-rust Azure SDK for Rust
- drasi-platform The Data Change Processing platform