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Microsoft Gets Rusty: Thoughts on Rust Adoption and C/C++ Departure

| rust | thoughts | video |

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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:

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