Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

376 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by mmastrac
(rustfoundation.org)

189 Comments

meerita

4 hours ago

Good news they adopted Rust as Tier-1 language. I hope their Weather app stop consuming more than 1GB RAM https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-...

Verdex

3 hours ago

I feel like the weather app makes a lot of sense from a corporate politics point of view.

A 1mb weather app would have a significantly less impressive pie chart associated with it come "here are our improvements" presentation.

Also if times get tough and you're told to reduce headcount by 10%, who do you want to get rid of. Sally who knows the USB driver end to end or Todd who wrote the bloated 1gb weather app. (Don't feel bad for Todd, he knew what he was getting himself into.)

ldobre

2 hours ago

Also, showing the weather is a great excuse to ask permissions for the user location.

afpx

30 minutes ago

The mac tahoe weather system daemon is also sus

throwaway894345

31 minutes ago

Unrelatedly, I'm still trying to figure out why Apple requires me to unlock my phone to look at the weather. Is there some concern that someone could pick up my phone and learn what city it is in?

jshier

14 minutes ago

You can use the weather widget on the lock screen, and as long as you have lock screen content when locked enabled, you can see the current area's weather just fine. Or do you want the whole app experience?

throwaway27448

12 minutes ago

I'm a little too lazy to experiment, but it wouldn't surprise me if that widget didn't function normally until the phone is unlocked.

throwaway894345

8 minutes ago

The lock screen widgets don't tell you much more than what you can get from looking outside. It's not very helpful to know that it's currently overcast and raining, but it would be a lot more helpful if I could know when the rain is supposed to stop or what the week's forecast is and so on.

freeplay

17 minutes ago

You want to be able to launch apps without unlocking your phone? Slippery slope.

throwaway894345

13 minutes ago

If the app doesn't have any sensitive information, then yes. We already do this with home screen widgets today, so clearly there's no real barrier.

swozey

an hour ago

I've been doing forest service stuff for a year with almost no signal and often no gps without antenna and it's incredible what asks for location permission to run. My amazon bought LEDs (15+, 3-5 diff types) all check location before I can connect them. I wind up waiting 30 seconds sometimes more to turn lights on. My generator and inverter have to phone home so that lags constantly.

Also I've been shadowbanned from a bunch of social media sites and had problems with payment systems, etc because Starlink confuses companies tracking user locations to geoips etc.

Won't even get into the apps that look downloaded and usable until you open them with no signal and they don't work before phoning home.

I've been meaning to go through ALL my apps and delete everything I don't use, I haven't installed a new app in years.

Then you have MacOS now that has the most "wtf" level permission prompts that make you think everything is phoning home or trying to access stuff on your network when it's just connecting bluetooth devices or something daily. I don't know how many games I've installed that now show up as having full screen or keyboard control permissions just to use input devices. I work on this stuff and can deduce what it's doing, especially after googling it, but "Stupidgame needs control of your system" is wild to someone who doesn't, I'm sure.

I've been wondering if it's almost nefarious that they want to get people used to allowing these seemingly system wide controls to be given to.. everything, by hiding the security-ok things behind a giant red flag warning.

Sorry went on a tangent. I miss specific permissions notifications I can trust.

edit: Oh, my "fix" for most of this is fakegps and mocking my android systemwide gps location to whatever, if you go through this.

nicman23

an hour ago

i prefer the macos mindset if not the actual OS

swozey

an hour ago

I just looked and I think what I'm talking about, where they folded more specific permission callouts under a broad term "Full disk access" "local devices" etc used to be more granular before they updated that UI to match the iphone. If I got a jumpscare permission prompt on macos, I used to actually be concerned. Now they're all jumpscares for basic stuff.

But I could be misremembering. I haven't liked any of the recent macos releases. I will begrudgingly install Golden Gate to hopefully fix my m1 max 64gb slowing ot a crawl with Tahoe.

throwaway85825

8 minutes ago

Based on windows bloat Sally got fired because she was an old timer and cost to much so all the Sally's are gone and they're all Todd's now and windows is an unstable bloated mess.

jm4

18 minutes ago

Not to mention, they have 1 GB of headroom in their back pocket if/when they need to make Windows more efficient. Quick rewrite of that app or just scrap it and they've saved months of optimization.

Escapado

3 hours ago

Did Todd just know or did his PO tell him to add telemetry tool number 24 while he was protesting and begged to be allowed to migrate to a newer rendering library but got shot down promptly because "KPI line must go up"? :)

xattt

3 hours ago

Todd was a script kiddie and never really knew what he was doing. He changed careers after the layoff and is now an owner of an electrical contracting business.

moooo99

an hour ago

The longer I work in corporate, the wiser Todd seems

throwaway27448

16 minutes ago

I think it's less about pie charts and more that weather apps can be very eyecandy-heavy. This sort of marketing works well for both consumers and board members.

xyst

2 hours ago

In this day and age, both Sally and Todd are expendable. Both have been silently training their replacement by feeding the data models.

Replaced by LLM and an offshore contractor. CaPiTaLiSm, right?

villish

24 minutes ago

The list of professions made obsolete is very long. Why should programming be protected if AI in the future can make software better, safer, and cheaper?

delta_p_delta_x

an hour ago

Calling the Weather app an 'app' is doing all the Win32, WPF, WinForms and WinUI developers a huge disservice.

It is essentially an entire Chromium instance around msn.com/weather.

onlyrealcuzzo

2 hours ago

That's less because of what it's implemented in - and more to do with all the tracking and libraries they want to reuse...

BigCo apps will take up lots of space and memory for BigCo reasons - obviously less if it's in Rust vs Go vs Python, but you could easily write Go apps that use far less memory than Rust apps written at BigCo due to BigCo reasons.

It's just not really that much of a priority for them to have their weather app use less than 1GB of memory. It's a far bigger priority for someone to insist that somebody else uses some bloated framework so they can get promoted.

throwaway894345

20 minutes ago

I've been having _a lot of fun_ writing Go apps that don't allocate anything and that use small, preallocated buffers to stream through requests/etc. Basically TigerStyle for Go. I don't use arenas, I just size everything for the worst case (or make the sizes configurable at startup) and still end up using much less memory.

This is really only possible because I told Fable to build the underlying allocation-free HTTP, JSON, etc libraries and consequently I'm not building anything serious yet (although the libraries are well-tested using pre-existing corpuses from reputable projects e.g. curl as well as fuzz tested).

Most "outputs" are passed as out parameters for the function to fill in, and results are Rust-like enums (a Go tagged union containing only small data). I could also have returned (T, error) but I would have to take care that the thing I pushed into the error argument doesn't allocate--not sure if I made the right decision or not, but for now it feels nice. The worst part is that I don't really have a good way to communicate detailed error information, but that hasn't bitten me yet.

This has also been a lot less effort than writing Rust, although Rust would have real checks for lifetimes and im/mutable and enum exhaustiveness and so on--so far I haven't been bitten, and I suspect things like enum exhaustiveness can be addressed via linter if necessary.

pjmlp

3 hours ago

The problem is the Webview2 prevalence, and note many Rust projects love their webviews as well.

isolay

3 hours ago

Whether vibecoded Rust will be better than whatever they are doing now remains to be seen.

dismalaf

4 minutes ago

Instead of leaking memory it'll just clone the whole heap over and over.

mr_00ff00

3 hours ago

The question in terms of memory is, will vibe coded rust get around ownership issues by .clone()-ing everything.

Maybe this has changed since I wrote Rust, but that was a classic beginner fix. Just throw memory at it.

JoshTriplett

an hour ago

https://github.com/luser/keep-calm-and-call-clone

"Keep calm and call clone" is a good strategy for getting things working. Don't prematurely optimize code until you know it's the bottleneck.

ben-schaaf

a minute ago

There's premature optimisation, where you write a whole bunch of complicated code to avoid cloning an Arc<>. And then there's "premature optimisation" where you skip any consideration for performance until it becomes a problem.

The latter is usually what people who use the quote "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" think it means. Don't just keep calm and clone, consider what you're cloning and why, and then hopefully we won't end up with even more horribly slow software.

bluGill

2 hours ago

The other things I've seen beginners do is throw unsafe at everything.

tredre3

2 hours ago

The things that unsafe enables are arbitrary pointers, FFI, and accessing union members in a C struct. It seems highly unlikely to me that unsafe would fix any beginner's problem.

.clone() on the other hand is indeed an easy/quick fix for a lot of issues you'd face when learning rust.

suddenlybananas

2 hours ago

I think beginner programmers are unlikely to use unsafe when learning rust but people coming from c or c++ who are beginners at rust might use unsafe all over the place.

bluGill

2 hours ago

Exactly - we have been using C or C++ for decades and most of us have a lot of experience. We think like programmers in the languages meaning we often do things that Rust won't allow without unsafe. A small percent of the time that is the right thing (which is why Rust have unsafe), but very often there is a Rust way that is just as performant if only we knew how to think like Rust programmers.

Pannoniae

an hour ago

Sadly it still feels like it's one of the languages where the language doesn't trust you, it tries to force you to do things "the right way". I do love quite a few of its design like how traits are, not forcing every method into the declaration, and the standard library is much less crazy than the C++ version.

Sadly, other things a bit less so - the story for the thin battery-less stdlib + npm-style churn encourages bloat, and the semantics are obsessed with safety at a heavy cost to productivity unless you spam clone() and reference-counting - but then your program becomes slow, kind of negating the advantages, you might as well have written it in C# or something...

rblatz

11 minutes ago

Yeah it doesn’t trust you, and for good reason the decades of developers making the same mistakes over and over again. If everyone was perfect you wouldn’t need Rust, but no one is perfect and that’s why Rust exists.

uecker

an hour ago

Yes, but this this is not a problem at all because any bug caused by misuse of unsafe (or unwrap) is entirely the fault of the programmer (or the AI) and not of Rust. /s

stefan_

16 minutes ago

Actually they just Arc<T> everything

hirvi74

44 minutes ago

I seriously do not think things could be any worse.

jordand

16 minutes ago

It won't, that 1GB+ belongs to Microsoft's advertisers and their many video ads

geodel

4 hours ago

But Tier-1 app consuming Tier-1 RAM seems officially approved.

unixhero

an hour ago

And that the calculator does not take 5 seconds to load

gregw2

2 hours ago

Those interested in this may find the following articles of interest:

Microsoft goals [edit: err, Microsoft hiring manager vision-casting goal ] to convert 1 billion lines of code to rust by 2030 via automated tooling enabling "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code": https://thenewstack.io/microsofts-bold-goal-replace-1b-lines...

DARPA work towards automating converting C code to Rust using a mix of 6 different teams using different approaches: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to... Feb 2026 Progress report: https://github.com/DARPA-TRACTOR-Program/Reports/blob/main/F...

jodrellblank

an hour ago

That is not "Microsoft goals", that is "one employee's LinkedIn comment of his personal goal".

eterm

an hour ago

There have also been repeated statements from NSA & CISA that they recommend all development should be done in memory safe languages.

It's abundantly clear that there is a strong headwind towards memory safety, whether that's Rust or GC'd languages.

estebank

an hour ago

A headwind makes it harder to advance in the direction you're going. I think you might have meant to say "there is a strong tailwind towards memory safety".

eterm

an hour ago

You're right, I better do a 360 on my comment ;)

burakemir

2 hours ago

It would be possible for me to give a more nuanced take, but the upshot is: none of that shit is going to work 100%.

One may get local maxima like an unsafe bonanza, or something that introduces a custom runtime memory management discipline at the cost of performance etc. Fully equivalent C++ to Rust in full generality is mainly wishful thinking. Of course that does not mean one should not try it.

See also my other comment.

gregw2

an hour ago

Oh, I 100% agree. The question is how much you can reduce the effort of the port/migration, and in particular the validation effort.

I've worked on projects where the core bits of code were "90%" converted by some automated tool, and in my view the overall benefit to the project timeline was probably only 20-30% because of the Amdahl's-law-type overheads of validation and bits of code not supported by the automation/conversion process. Nice, but no silver bullet.

Non-idiomatic porting also isn't super-helpful if the resulting code isn't maintainable.

i2talics

an hour ago

I hope announcements like this show that Rust is not a fledgling little language that moves fast and breaks things anymore. It's a mature, serious competitor to well established languages like C++ and C#. This is particularly important when trying to compare the experience of using Rust to other languages in the "better C/C++" space like Zig and Odin -- these are much newer and have more rough edges than Rust.

tialaramex

28 minutes ago

Rust 1.0 was in 2015. Most of these languages you're thinking of out of the Handmade Community didn't even start development until around the point Rust 1.0 shipped.

In theory Odin 2027, the 1.0 release of Bill's Odin language, is scheduled for, as the name suggests, early 2027. Zig does not have an announced 1.0 schedule, and who knows for the other two famous Handmade languages.

From the rash of "C++ successor" languages a few years ago, Carbon is still being worked on, Herb Sutter's "Cpp2" seems dead or at least in a coma, Hylo is probably also in a coma, it has several "Write this text" type blog posts, dated 2025 for example...

Havoc

10 minutes ago

For me it was the inclusion in the kernel. That locks it in as here to stay

pjmlp

4 hours ago

This is very big news, all major OS vendors that also have a role in C and C++ language tooling, now have diversified their options in systems programming languages for greenfield development.

Additionally we finally get some public news about the MSVC integration rumors regarding Rust.

ghostly_s

3 hours ago

Are you thinking this augurs more interoperability features in C?

pjmlp

3 hours ago

Why should it?

COM and WinRT (basically COM Next) are the way to do cross language Interoperability in Windows since VB 5 replaced VBX with OCX, it was a key feature in .NET Framework design, and revamped on Windows 8, when WinRT was introduced as the original design for .NET (Ext-VOS).

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

See windows-rs crate.

pornel

4 hours ago

The big news here is they've replaced LLVM with MSVC's backend.

booi

a minute ago

I'm sure that's a requirement for being a "Tier-1" language.

devy

an hour ago

This makes strategic sense in multiple ways:

1. Rust's memory safety design will help Microsoft improve a gigantic portfolios of products that have been known to have lots of CVEs and 70% of them are memory safety issues, according to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich's talk at RustCon last year.[1]

2. Windows 11's forceful push to retire millions of legacy PC hardware by putting Windows 10 EOL last October was absurd for millions of consumers and businesses. I was literrally helping a S&B having to replace the entire fleet of working PCs simply because Windows 10 of EOL and Windows 11 refused to run on those legacy hardware. Quite honestly those PCs ran just fine! That's why some has been migrated to Linux, in particular to Google's ChromeOS Flex.[2]

3. RAM shortage due to AI boom exhausted the memory chip manufacturers' production pipepline for at least the next 5 years. This means the mainstream PCs sold today will actually have a diminishing RAM size configurations than last year's in order for the PC manufacturers to not drastically raise the product price (or raise prices drastically for high RAM configurations like Apple does). This requires the Windows 11 operating system to be more conservative about RAM usage, Rust can be a part of that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDtMuS7BExE

[2] https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/

bryanlarsen

3 hours ago

This is from rustconf. A lot of the focus at Rustconf this year has been C++ interop, Python Interop, Javascript interop -- it's no longer about "rewrite it in rust", it's about being part of the ecosystem.

bluGill

2 hours ago

Good. As a C+++ programmer Rust has some things that intrigue me. However I have no desire to rewrite everything in rust and so interoperability has been what is holding me back.

We rewrote everything a few years back, completing in 2014 (Rust 1.0 came in 2015) - it costs nearly a billion dollars! I cannot in good conscience go back to management and ask for another billion dollars to rewrite again (Rust might be more productive, but inflation will eat that up, so I expect a rewrite to be more expensive). If Rust can work with my existing code though - I know of a number of small places where there is reason to rewrite anyway because the code is bad (or sometimes was good but not nicely flexible for the features we have added since).

ComputerGuru

4 hours ago

So when will we get tier 1 debugging support in Visual Studio?

flohofwoe

4 hours ago

Optimistic to assume that modern day programmers even know what a debugger is, or if they do, consider it as anything else than some weird ancient shibboleth only used by the greybeards ;)

Levitating

4 hours ago

To be fair, even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I really only regularly used debuggers in C because it can't display arbitrary types in debug print statements.

josephg

3 hours ago

Debuggers still have their place in algorithm heavy work, or to pull apart heap dumps to try and figure out obscure bugs.

Even LLMs use debuggers. I asked Claude to reverse engineer a closed source binary the other day. It used gdb to trace its behaviour. Didn’t even use ghidra.

rafaelmn

4 hours ago

Debugger MCP better

josephg

3 hours ago

But of a tangent but I think cognitive skills are starting to become like physical skills. If we don’t move our bodies, we waste away physically. If we don’t do hard cognitive work sometimes - like writing and debugging code - I worry our minds will atrophy.

I don’t have a problem with cars. But walking is still good for us.

bluGill

2 hours ago

Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything. I know a few people who blacksmith as a hobby (often for the physical exercise as much as the work), but most people are happy not knowing how to do that job. I know how to set the air-fuel ratio on a gas engine, but I'm glad I don't need to tweak those parameters while driving (unlike a 1910s car where you did), and I won't miss oil changes on my cars as I move to electric.

lelanthran

15 minutes ago

> Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything.

Are you trying to be funny?

bluGill

8 minutes ago

Work should be worth. I'm not sure if that is me or autocorrect.

a012

4 hours ago

It’s all /skills now

pjmlp

4 hours ago

You have it already on VSCode, which isn't quite the same, however nowadays it is an open question which one is more relevant for Microsoft's management, especially given that VS isn't cross platform (see Azure), and is stuck with WPF/.NET Framework.

mrec

4 hours ago

I'd also love to see MS sponsoring Windows support for a modern linker like mold or wild.

delta_p_delta_x

3 hours ago

lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe. Although the latter has incremental linking, which none of the Unix-like linkers have.

jcelerier

2 hours ago

to be fair mold or wild's full link is a few hundred times faster than a link.exe incremental relink

jeroenhd

2 hours ago

println!() already works, who needs more than that?

Kidding aside, VS Code has excellent debugging support already. Unless you need to share your Rust code base with a legacy C/C++ code base, I don't think VS is the best environment for Rust programming.

There are good use cases for staying within full-fat VS's capability set (drivers, among other things), but I don't think Microsoft needs to add Rust to VS in this much of a hurry.

petilon

3 hours ago

If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?

brunoborges

3 hours ago

Because it takes time. Even with coding agents, to add the capability. Then, there is the question on whether Rust developers who like to engage with Microsoft tools, would really consider Visual Studio as their IDE, instead of something like VS Code, VS Code Agent Mode, GitHub Copilot App, or GitHub Copilot CLI with simpler editors.

I'd be curious to know whether Rust developers believe Visual Studio is the right place for Microsoft to invest Rust specific coding capabilities.

pdpi

3 hours ago

There's two ways to approach this — build tooling for existing Rust developers to get them to adopt the Microsoft stack, or build tooling for existing Microsoft stack developers to get them to adopt Rust.

I'd argue that the former is less important than the latter, and my understanding is that Visual Studio is still the IDE for Windows-centric development, so for those MS-first developers, Rust missing from VS means Rust is poorly supported, end of story.

isolay

3 hours ago

It would have to be the 2nd option. Who in their right mind would voluntarily choose Windows as their dev env? It will have to be those who are already there.

bluGill

2 hours ago

Most people don't have a choice. Corporate IT has choosen what I run my machine on. I have used a native linux machine, but since my email is still on outlook, everybody uses teams, and all the non-code documents are on windows I end up having to have a windows machine. Linux in a VM under windows ends up being the easiest workflow (though I'm just starting to try WSL and so far it is looking good)

disgruntledphd2

2 hours ago

> (though I'm just starting to try WSL and so far it is looking good)

WSL is really nice, as is Windows Terminal. I particularly love its fonts (but that's probably just me).

vouwfietsman

an hour ago

This kind of stuff is why its hard to have good conversations about tooling. Windows is the best place for many kinds of software dev, but perhaps not the kind you are doing.

neutronicus

2 hours ago

Visual Studio brings a lot to the table for C++ development. Specifically the Debugger, although IntelliSense also often succeeds at queries that stump clangd.

If they can replicate that capability, I think it can be a draw.

I was a mac / Linux guy before my current gig, but Visual Studio is so much more capable than XCode that I basically only use the Windows machine except to debug mac-specific issues. Less so, now, admittedly, that the malware scanner process is literally always pegging a CPU core.

not_a9

3 hours ago

Visual Studio does have a really nice C++ debugger - one would imagine the C++ debugging capabilities should translate to Rust.

germandiago

3 hours ago

> Even with coding agents

Because of coding agents? :D

eterm

an hour ago

Given how long it took visual studio to get 64bit support, I wouldn't hold your breath!

( Edit: I should probably inform the layperson: It was Visual Studio 2022 )

afdbcreid

2 hours ago

It is, with extensions (using rust-analyzer of course). I don't know what's the status inside Microsoft.

cwbrandsma

3 hours ago

Because it is already supported in VS Code.

I don't think this is a hot take, but I'm predicting Microsoft will gradually phase out Visual Studio in favor of VS Code.

CodeCompost

3 hours ago

Agreed but I think you need to pry Visual Studio from VB.NET developers' cold dead hands.

neutronicus

2 hours ago

C++ developers, too. I suppose they're splitting out the real powerful stuff (Debugger, LSP) for VSCode's consumption.

swiftcoder

4 hours ago

I guess the big question is whether they are going to open up rustc_codegen_utc for use outside of Microsoft?

afdbcreid

2 hours ago

They responded in the Zulip threads that yes, this is the plan, although they don't know if and what things will be open-source yet.

js8

4 hours ago

Is Microsoft still trying to embrace, extend, extinguish Netscape after all those years? :-)

layer8

4 hours ago

You’ll know when they publish Visual R++ or Rust.NET.

Havoc

9 minutes ago

What a cursed comment haha

SSLy

3 hours ago

you jest but F# already does the ocamlness of Rust, no? and you don't need a borrow checker.

layer8

2 hours ago

For tracking ownership of non-memory resources you still need something like that.

boredatoms

4 hours ago

I guess we should watch for contributions to Servo

rererereferred

an hour ago

But which GUI toolkit will they use for all their new rust applications?

guywithahat

7 minutes ago

It’s cool to see rust join C++, C#, and typescript as primary engineering languages. Confusingly there are no tier 2 or 3 languages, just tier 1 at Microsoft

ellyagg

2 hours ago

While literally true, the phrasing of this title will certainly and (IMO) purposefully confuse some headline scanners vs: “Rust Is a Tier-1 Language at Microsoft”.

Surac

3 hours ago

I remember an other 1 tier language ms once had. Anyone remember Visual-J? On the other hand if we could code in rust and get windows.forms as a ui it might make sense. MS is burning UI layer faster than one can train on

_joel

4 hours ago

Site down, maybe they need port it to use Rust...

They use wordpress

seki285

3 hours ago

What is wrong with wordpress exactly?

bluGill

3 hours ago

there are a lot of really bad plugins that are used. Also there are a lot of really bad admins who have out of date versions that are misconfigured.

mcmcmc

3 hours ago

Matt Mullenweg

echelon

4 hours ago

A lot of infrastructure is going to be ported to Rust.

It's fantastic for websites and servers, and LLMs are very good at generating it.

The primary downside of Rust is the long compile times, especially with macros (serde, etc.) If that can be fixed, it will be sublime.

tonyedgecombe

4 hours ago

I like Rust a lot but I'm not sure it would come very high up my list for web applications.

echelon

3 hours ago

Axum and Actix are phenomenal web frameworks.

The type system and error handling ergonomics make it easier to write defect-free code than, say, Go or Java.

Simple servers are request scoped and mostly feature linear request handling, so you're writing simple vanilla Rust without the complex pointer semantics that you would use for systems programming. The async pieces aren't difficult either.

Serde-annotated structs are the best serialization/deserialization story anywhere. It integrates super ergonomically into Axum and Actix to make writing request handlers a breeze. They're super easy to read, too.

germandiago

2 hours ago

> Axum and Actix are phenomenal web frameworks

Compared to what? I see ASP.NET Core and Quarkus very competitive. The virtual threads in Java are great, paired with structured concurrency IMHO.

If I have to go microservice or API, I would choose FastAPI for fastest delivery and if I have to rewrite, Go, unless it is massive scale and scaling horizontally becomes a headache I would not consider Rust/C++ for this.

All the backend, etc. for the company I have been working for is C++ for the fast parts but all tools around are Python (with NiceGUI and Flask mostly).

I think the combination is quite powerful, btw.

tomrod

an hour ago

Say more. I need me proper rust in the browser.

edukite

3 hours ago

First compile. Every another will be significantly faster since compiler is incremental

dismalaf

23 minutes ago

If I were the Rust foundation I'd be keeping this to myself right now.

KingOfCoders

3 hours ago

Fable migrated a Go/Wails project for me to Rust/GPUI and it's so much faster, there is the possibility of Rust to gobble up many more projects.

axus

an hour ago

I love how World of Warcraft "gear tier" jargon has expanded into the rest of the world. Pre-Y2K, the pseudo-formal usage of "tier-N" wasn't widespread in the US.

minimaxir

5 minutes ago

In World of Warcraft, gear tier is an ordinal representing the raid tier the gear was made accessible in, not an indication of its importance/power.

HPsquared

2 hours ago

Visual Rust sounds like a defect but I'm looking forward to it.

macleginn

3 hours ago

The text is mostly about rustc_codegen_utc; maybe this should be reflected in the title?

Also the use of italics there is rather jarring.

bitwize

40 minutes ago

NT kernel rewrite when?

Colegno

2 hours ago

Being technically approved by Microsoft is not a proof of quality...

afdbcreid

2 hours ago

It could as well be the opposite, but Rust does not need a proof of quality today, certainly not from Microsoft. Still, becoming Tier 1 in major trillion-dollar corporations (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and I know Google also has efforts in that direction) is something.

bryanlarsen

39 minutes ago

Google announced that Android contains 5 million lines of Rust last year; sounds Tier-1 to me.

larodi

3 hours ago

ermm... which are the rust-native libs which enable winrt3.0 native apps?

this_user

3 hours ago

Now their broken slop code is at least memory safe.

DidntUseIt

4 hours ago

Link doesn’t work.

What’s a Tier 1 language?

gshubert17

4 hours ago

(Link worked for me ...)

This “Tier-1 language” engineering status for Rust means giving internal teams a paved path from local development to production: secure toolchain builds, productive developer tooling, quality workflows, deep platform integration, and compliance with the SDL requirements Microsoft software must meet.

swiftcoder

4 hours ago

Specifically, it joins a list of existing Tier 1 languages (C++, C#, and TypeScript), as "one of the best-supported languages for internal development at Microsoft"

meindnoch

4 hours ago

Tier 1 is the summit of summits - the summum bonum of languages, the highest order to which a language can aspire. Very few ever attain it. Non multa, sed multum: not many, but only those of extraordinary quality. Most languages remain forever in Tier 3, never passing beyond its gates. Of these, scarcely 1% ascend to Tier 2. And from that already distinguished company, a mere 0.1% possess the refinement, depth, and excellence required to cross the final threshold into Tier 1.

Consider what that means: Tier 1 represents roughly the top 0.001% of languages. Pauci sed electi - few, but chosen. The crème de la crème. The aristocracy of languages. Primus inter pares, yet standing at the very edge of what programming language greatness can be.

Ad astra per aspera. Through hardship, to the stars. Tier 1 is not merely another rank: it is the ultima Thule, the farthest frontier, the crown, the apotheosis.

flohofwoe

4 hours ago

It means it's about as good as C++ ;)

afdbcreid

2 hours ago

Yes, about as good as a language that is 40 years old, and was also (like Rust) 10 years old when becoming Tier 1 inside Microsoft, while there were far less alternatives.

Seems pretty good to me ;)

(I know you're joking).

aynyc

3 hours ago

It means a language for the very elite special force unit. In MSFT, that means the Ads teams will be able to serve you Ads in excel very quickly. /s

FrustratedMonky

2 hours ago

As much as I like Rust. Still sad that F# didn't get this much support from their own mother.

m3kw9

an hour ago

Good, C# is one of the worst languages there is, hopefully they turn it in to tier 18

mgaunard

4 hours ago

does it mean there is a rust.net?

dralley

4 hours ago

There is a rustc_codegen_clr which transpiles to .NET

https://github.com/fractalfir/rustc_codegen_clr

mgaunard

3 hours ago

> This project is still early in its developement. Bugs, crashes and miscompilations are expected. DO NOT USE IT FOR ANYTHING SERIOUS.

how can one claim it is tier-1?

Also random student, nothing official from Microsoft.

debugnik

an hour ago

We thought your Rust.NET comment was somewhat in jest. No, Microsoft isn't porting Rust to .NET, they barely try to support anything other than C# on it nowadays, but the article mentions an internal adapter for MSVC codegen.

The project linked above has been posted to HN in the past a few times though.

pali6

3 hours ago

That project is not in any direct way related to Microsoft

DidntUseIt

3 hours ago

Just had a PTSD flashback...

The year was 2002, VB6 had just been retired for VB.NET which had 0 backward compatibility.

And then we all became Flash/AS3 developers.

The End

superkuh

2 hours ago

I hope this kind of thing means Rust stops making so many rapid breaking changes in th compiler. I've tried it twice, once in early 2021 once 2025. Both times I tried to compile a few random projects I found on the web, stuff like a wordpress fanfic scraper, a software defined radio program, etc.

In 2021 my linux distro I was using had just been released 3 months prior but it's rustc already could not compile 2 of 3 projects due to the use of new features added to rustc in those 3 months. In the SDR case I knew the author and he was able to re-write it in more general rust code and it worked great. In 2025 my linux distro had been out for a couple years. None of the rust projects I tried would compile with my rustc.

Rust, in the past, seemed a very bleeding edge, move fast and break things community. I hope that with more people using it in more places the demographics change and people won't always target latest and greatest. A lifetime for the compiler of at least a few years would make it a very useable language. Adoption at microsoft might help this.

0x457

an hour ago

You can compile any old code with newer rustc as long as old project does not use unstable features that have changed/went away. What are you on? I recently recompiled project from 2015 with latest stable rust just fine.

All breaking changesin rust done via editions and you can mix-and-match editions.

estebank

an hour ago

I suspect GP is using system rustc to build random projects off of github and doesn't use one of the distros that actually updates rustc, like Fedora, SuSE or Arch.

Then the conversation is about forward compatibility, whether developers should wait X amount of time before using new std APIs or features, and whether the ease of using rustup and project expectation of it being accessible is reasonable or not.

i2talics

an hour ago

It sounds like you are not running into breaking changes, you are just running into projects that like to use new features that are not available in your older compiler.

mtgh2s

4 hours ago

You gotta have balls or be receiving tons of money to publicly celebrate the sloppiest software company of the decade making your programming language Tier 1 internally.

nazgulsenpai

3 hours ago

Probably the fact they're a $3.7tn company has something to do with it.

VimEscapeArtist

3 hours ago

M$ choosing Rust might be the strongest argument for picking Go instead

germandiago

3 hours ago

They strike different balances.

Rust is absolute performance, similar to C++. Go is deliver fast and get a very good performance to effort ratio.

calvbak

4 hours ago

This is great! Hope this trend will continue in the future; using a memory-safe language should be a top priority imo in context of the coming rogue AI swarms.

the__alchemist

4 hours ago

With certain rough edges like complex traits and Async aside, rust is an S-tier lang in several domains. Of interest:

  - Embedded
  - PC desktop applications
  - Computationally-intense scientific programming. (Chem, structural bio etc)
  - OSes, drivers etc
  - High-performance tasks in general. CPU, GPU, etc.
It's not a memory-safety one-trick pony; it's a well-rounded lang which has learned from its predecessors.

jdcasale

3 hours ago

Yeah I'd written some rust ~ 10 years ago when the language was very different and that led me to believe that it was a 'great within it's niche' sort of thing for a long time, but after spending the last couple of years with it as a daily driver I think it's a pretty great general-purpose language.

The one really common gotcha with rust is that when trying to write concurrent code, newbies tend to throw Arc<RwLock<T>> goo around everywhere, and they end up with the world's shittiest garbage collector.

germandiago

3 hours ago

Give me something like boost.multiindex for Rust, and maybe I could think of trying some experiments.

I think C++ is an excellent choice due to its volubility actually. Bc when I want safety, I mostly have it (but I have done a lot of C++, admittedly).

m00dy

3 hours ago

yeah, locks are expensive.

the__alchemist

3 hours ago

It is interesting to see the different patterns used due to different cases and tastes. For example, my concurrency patterns rarely use locks, and are instead usually one of:

  - Dedicated hardware via DMA, multiple cores/MCUs etc
  - Thread pools (e.g rayon)
  - GPU
  - SIMD
  - Atomics
  - Interrupts and their ISRs
  - Event loops
  - std::sync Thread and MPSC (My Std rust default for not blocking the GUI etc)

surajrmal

2 hours ago

Most of it comes down to avoiding shared data. Unfortunately it requires forethought to do that well. There are also many cases where you do want to share data for optimal performance as other options are ultimately too heavyweight.

Also worth noting that an event loop by itself doesn't give you serialization by itself, it can just allow you to gain concurrency without parallelism. You still need some form of serialization by way of something like actors (or async locks).

mgaunard

4 hours ago

All those applications area sensitive to asynchronous programming.

okanat

3 hours ago

Rust's async can be very lightweight depending on the runtime implementation. tokio and embassy are both runtimes but former is a throughput-optimized heavily multi-threaded while latter is a simple cooperative multitasking for embedded. We use both at my day job. Even 64k flash and 16k ram is enough for embassy.

Verdex

3 hours ago

Yeah, I primarily use rust because it's got algebraic data types, pattern matching, and cargo.

If ocaml had a cargo like experience, then I would migrate there.

saghm

3 hours ago

I've said for a while that the main reason Rust is so popular is that it has a lot of effort put into the developer experience, with the low-level safety honestly not being all that important to a large portion of the programmers who would be fine with a garbage collector. I used to think that maybe a "Rust with garbage collector" would come along, but at this point it honestly seems more likely that an optional garbage collector would be added to Rust (probably with just the primitives in std and leaving it up to libraries to provide a more full experience, like with async runtimes).

Surac

2 hours ago

a rust with gc is already available. it is called c# and runs on all os nowerdays

mook

3 hours ago

Oh, its good at doing desktop applications these days? Which GUI libraries are good these days? Some native win32 binding? Are there good equivalents for Qt?

I'm interested in getting back to native application development; the job is on Electron right now and it's… meh.

bigfishrunning

4 hours ago

Honestly, the only domains that I think rust isn't suitable for are:

* rapid-prototyping, where javascript and python are still top-tier

* adding scriptability to existing programs, where lua and scheme (and python) are popular

* Server-side API implementation (rust is usable here, but I think Go fits the slot better)

vablings

3 hours ago

Rapid prototyping is almost a meme at this point. If you are hand rolling code old school, you will waste more time shoehorning JavaScript and python semantics into rust code and end up with worse quality that takes more time rather than writing it from rust.

People did this a lot when rust was not as popular but there are plenty of very good rust programmers now who understand the language and can make programs that are significantly more performance for a marginal development cost.

Script ability can also be done in rust, Notably Zed (rust ide/vscode whatevers) is written in rust, and all the plugins are compiled to WASM, sandboxed and loaded.

Go is pretty nice for server-side API but if your application share types between boundries then rust is better

germandiago

3 hours ago

> Rapid prototyping is almost a meme at this point

> People did this a lot when rust was not as popular but there are plenty of very good rust programmers now who understand the language and can make programs that are significantly more performance for a marginal development cost.

Why isn't the game industry moving to it then? Bc it just cannot compete at volubility with C++, among other things. Yes, you can have skilled people, but the borrow checker is still there and that is an anti-change-me-fast fact of life. I think things like sending batches of info to the GPU in casted ways, alignment, etc. all go against safety naturally but this is fundamentally what needs to be done anyway when transfering data to the GPU, so adding a layer of safety for the sake of doing it to notice that your data-oriented pipeline has to suddenly change its shape would mean repeating work...

Namely, Rust is just not good at this. Rust is good if you can replicate a safe layer that is very reusable every time (when interacting with unsafe) or when you do not need unsafe at all or hardly, where you can take advantage of its safety fully.

Also, there are certain very tweaked data structures such as Boost.MultiIndex or linked lists with intrusive hooks and others that are not easy at all in Rust and they do have value in some situations. I had some of this in some telecommunication systems before.

gregw2

an hour ago

Why isn't the game industry moving to rust?

Someone in that industry can perhaps speak to it, but I have two cents of perspective...

I have helped a young person with gamedev interests try to learn rust (on Windows). They've learned some rust, but the graphics+Windows libraries and primitives to work with are not very good nor straightforward, even with AI assistance. Besides weakness in the gaming/rendering domain, there seemed to be some very real versioning/dependency hell that also didn't help.

It's massively easier to make progress on even just a 2D game with something like GDScript-based Godot (or Unity or...).

bigfishrunning

9 minutes ago

It seems like you're comparing "start from scratch in rust" to "start with an existing game engine in some other language". That's not really a fair comparison. there are popular game engines in rust (although i think they're mostly smaller/more niche then something like unity or godot), bevy comes to mind.

tredre3

2 hours ago

> Why isn't the game industry moving to it then? Bc it just cannot compete at volubility with C++, among other things.

I have no opinion regarding rust suitability as a game language, but your answer doesn't sound right.

The actual reason is much simpler. The industry is built on a handful of game engines. Those engines are extended or scripted in C++ or C#. Thus the vast, vast majority of the work force will only have experience with those languages and the entirety of game studios' tooling is built around those. The end.

SleepyMyroslav

an hour ago

I work in gamedev. Here is a simple answer: proprietary gaming platforms have no plans to support Rust.

mrec

2 hours ago

I don't think "volubility" means what you think it means. The usual meaning of "voluble" is "talkative" (gesprächig if your username is accurate). I'm not quite sure what you're going for here or in an earlier comment, but suspect it's something more like "ergonomic", i.e. the language being easy/natural to write and not getting in your way.

Pannoniae

an hour ago

No, rapid development is essential when you're making games. It's not a "solved science", sure you can code something up and slap some programmer art on it then ship it but you very well know that won't be usable. You need to iterate on the gameplay and gamefeel a lot if you want something more than slop.

One way is sure the native language + embedded scripting language combo but that's got the trap of impedance mismatch i.e. you spend all your time making engine not game then it overruns. But in any case having a way to iterate fast is a hidden productivity superpower, look at how many game studios have Live++ licences on their webpage;)

bryanlarsen

3 hours ago

Rust is great for rapid protoyping, IMO. Or, at least the subset of rapid prototyping that involves massive rewrites to try out different approaches. Rust has a saying "if it compiles, it works", the compiler really ensures that you don't miss something when doing that rewrite.

germandiago

3 hours ago

> Rust is great for rapid protoyping, IMO

If you have to iterate a lot the shape of your code... no, it is not any good at this...

edukite

3 hours ago

My employer company go through JavaScript, Java, Golang and at the end landed on Rust for srver side and don't want to change anything. Everything is Rust now, regardless of traffic.

I don't know why you think it's only usable but this is your right.

bigfishrunning

3 hours ago

I do think rust works there (as you clearly know), i just like Go's ergonomics for that exact task better, that's all.

larme

3 hours ago

GPU programming?

the__alchemist

3 hours ago

Rust is great for GPU programming, or at least for writing the Host (CPU) side without friction. WGPU or FFI-based Vulkan etc bindings for graphics. Cudarc + normal Cuda kernels for general purpose compute. I bring these up as they're easy-to-use and mature.

varjag

4 hours ago

Calculate ackermann(4,4), make no mistakes.