Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

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

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.

A disgruntled former Azure employee posting what a clusterfuck their SW, including their Rust effort is? That’s both rare and interesting.

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...

Alas, that ship has sailed and Rust has many interesting features so I'm comfy with it taking over the role of C/C++ over the next decades.

I see this on here a lot on this site, but Rust hasn't been that in over a decade. Rust's devotion to post 1.0 stability is massive and has involved some interesting design choices. I started writing run in 2015(?) and only hit one breaking change in the language. It was a niche bug in a macro that was fixed later in a later release.

Just watching hackernews you see lots of news about it, but these are additive and not breaking things. I was still writing lots of mio-style async code after async await was out. You don't have to adapt new style or libraries. I used to have a joke that you could tell a codebase's age based on the error handling libraries used, but even with that it was additive. Often multiple would exist in different parts of the same code base. "Oh wow, I've gone deep on this refactor.... I'm starting to see error_chain"

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).

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.)

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

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.

Hilarious that the article is like "Apple's weather app is only 200MB!"

The day that OS vendors started abandoning native apps was a hilarious day.

The main pain point IME was poor debugger visualizers for standard containers and enums. I fixed some of that for the standard containers by writing some natvis files for std: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=state%3Aclosed%20... . Admittedly, they broke a few times. They also weren't automatically included in the pdbs, so I wrote a crate for that: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/natvis-pdbs . And then someone crated and stabilized #[debugger_visualizer] for rust itself, which can do the same job: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/attributes/debugger.html .

(...I should check on enum visualization, but I suspect it's still poor.)

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.

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

And for all we know, it might be officially supported in their internal builds of Visual Studio.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

* 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)

windows-rs

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.

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.

https://github.com/fractalfir/rustc_codegen_clr

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

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

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