Russinovich: Microsoft is “All-in” on Rust (Premium)

Rust may be controversial over in Linux-land, but there's no such controversy at Microsoft, which has embraced the memory-safe language without condition. I'm glad to hear that, and am not surprised that the adults over in the Azure group have a firm grip on the rudder. But I'm also vaguely happy to discover that the software giant is going down a path I outlined when first learned about Rust and Microsoft's initial adoption. It is working to a future in which it will use AI to rewrite its core software kernels in this relatively new language.

Many things need to happen before that simple-sounding but technically complex miracle occurs, perhaps more than is obvious. Among the issues are developer familiarity with the language, modern tools for working on Rust, C++ interoperability--a key issue for a platform that dates back to the 1990s and Microsoft's fixation at the type with Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and C++ specifically--and advances in AI coding capabilities. But let's get real here. We know all that is happening. And we know that the AI piece of this puzzling is happening quite quickly.

So yes, one day, an engineer at Microsoft will wave a magic wand and all the code will just get better, better in this case meaning a guarantee of safety, improved performance, and all the other benefits that come from lesser code refactoring efforts. But today, we're just at the beginning of this journey. And a recent talk by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich provides a timely update to his company's use of Rust across the stack, and how it's evolved over time.
? An update on Linux and Rust
This is timely because of a recent flare-up in the Linux community. I told about half that story in From the Editor’s Desk: The Problem is You (Premium), but there have been some important developments since.

Here's a quick recap: In October 2022, Linus Torvalds merged the first Rust code into the Linux kernel. This wasn't the first use of Rust in a major computing platform--Google announced it would use Rust in the Android kernel in April 2021--but Linux is basically the infrastructure for the planet, so this was big news. The problem, of course, is people: Some of the old-school graybeards that maintain the Linux kernel have resisted this shift, for reasons practical (Rust and C/C++ interoperability) and personal (their expertise is being undermined by an unfamiliar technology).

Because Linux is developed in the open, the internal fights over Rust are public. Most recently, a Linux kernel maintainer refused to accept a Rust code submission, trigger a battle in which both sides were wrong. The net result was that the code submitter dropped out contributing code to Linux and then, after Torvalds crapped on him for trying to work around the system he put in place, he dropped out of an open source project he had founded, too.

That's where I had left things when I wrote that article linked above, as things were happening in real time and what I really...