The company says engineers say working with Rust has been “generally positive”. Still, many features are still absent with Microsoft promising to add support to help continue with experimenting. While C and C++ remain very popular, they are aging languages. Rust is a modern programming tool that is considered “memory-safe languages”. That’s because it is specifically designed to protect against vulnerabilities in memory corruption. Microsoft has said it is exploring the idea of re-writing its products in Rust. The company’s interest in the security-focused language to combat a consistent problem. Specifically, the company points out over 70% of all patches it sent out over the last 10-years dealt with memory bugs. Rust was developed to deal with these problems.
Update
Today, Microsoft updated on its progress. “I’ve been tasked with an experimental rewrite of a low-level system component of the Windows codebase (sorry, we can’t say which one yet),” said Adam Burch, Software Engineer at the Microsoft Hyper-V team, in a blog post today. “Though the project is not yet finished, I can say that my experience with Rust has been generally positive,” Burch added. “In general, new components or existing components with clean interfaces will be the easiest to port to Rust.” Of course, Microsoft already has its own memory-safe language in C#. However, the company seems more interested in embracing the more mature Rust than waiting for C# to develop further. That said, development of C# will almost certainly continue even if Rust is adopted by the company.
