alt Hacker NewsRust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
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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.
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.
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.
Conversion of legacy nontrivial C++ code bases into Rust (or anything else for that matter) feels like it should be one of the "Millenium problems" for AGI. That and full self driving - including the nuances of gesturing to a human about who's going to reverse in a single lane in a snowstorm.
But if 50% of code can be converted automatically to safe idiomatic Rust? Great. Doesn't sound too far fetched. But yes, there's certainly a long tail here.
The big news here is they've replaced LLVM with MSVC's backend.
What’s the story for Rust-C++ interoperability these days? That’s what kills adoption. Most C++ devs I know like the idea of Rust, but no one is going to go rewrite 30 years of working code. It needs to be something you can incorporate gradually.
If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?
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.
Just to clarify, are they 'using' it, or are they 'embracing' it?
So when will we get tier 1 debugging support in Visual Studio?
I've been writing Rust professionally for the last 5 years (where my first decade of professional experience started in frontend, then moved down the stack TypeScript/Node, Go, C# and so on).
From the perspective of high level application development, I can't see a technical use case for a language other than Rust these days. If wasm worked (and MacOS/Windows/Android/iOS native UI support existed), I would write my backends and frontends exclusively in Rust.
From a low level programming perspective, the high performance of Rust combined with the self-describing type system makes it very ergonomic to use (trying to figure out how a C function signature translates to behavior is a frustrating experience for me).
The thing I have been most saddened about is the lack of professional opportunities for Rust, particularly in Sydney (where I live). I considered moving to the US for the higher salaries and access to Rust roles but recently landed a role here.
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-...
From the linked Zulip thread (https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/131828-t-com...):
> We are running different workloads including rustc perf suite. In general the runtime performance is on par with llvm.
Not what I would've expected!
I guess the big question is whether they are going to open up rustc_codegen_utc for use outside of Microsoft?
I don't know why I feel the entire software world is going to switch to Rust (more than the others), C++, and Assembly soon.
Especially after the successful Bun 1.4 runtime migration to Rust.
The best C++ interop is just writing C++. Anything else is just wasting time and energy.
Is Microsoft still trying to embrace, extend, extinguish Netscape after all those years? :-)
I haven't made a full switch yet, at this point I'm experimenting more heavily in Rust.
First I built a wrapper for a very simple text editor based on KDEs KTextEditor (basically bindings around Qt C++) then a wasm wrapper around Canvas/WebGL for a basic 2d display list that currently supports sprites and gradient masking.
So far I've been getting away with it just as pure vibe code.
However, the bulk of my primary application is written in Typescript (both client, server and workers). I watched a recent podcast with Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and Typescript) where he made a strong argument for why they chose Go over Rust for the updated Typescript compiler. Due to similarities between Typescript and Go, partially based around them both being GC languages, it was just a better fit for a port.
So I am on the fence a bit here but still leaning towards Rust. I'm going to see how far I can push my two personal experiments. I'd really like to get the significant majority of the code I write into two languages (Typescript for anything web-ish and Rust for everything server-ish).
Microsoft is a tier-0 company.
In my time in VC++ and .NET teams, there was only one 1st tier language at MS. It was the one that existed to be whatever Windows wanted - VC++. I've not been there for about 10 years but I haven't heard that anything changed and the blog pretty much confirms that sentiment.
My advice to the Rust team: you're going to get shoved so I hope you're good at shoving back. At least you don't have to worry about stevesi (unless you're with a16z or have kids).
But which GUI toolkit will they use for all their new rust applications?
Visual Rust sounds like a defect but I'm looking forward to it.
What other langs do they consider tier 1? What’s in tier 2?
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 interesting how things have changed in 25 years. Around 2001, Microsoft was crusading against open source and facing an antitrust lawsuit with Netscape.
Now 25 years later, MS runs its cloud businesses with Linux, and their development in Rust.
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
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”.
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.
How the open source turn tables have open source turned
A MSVC-backend? At this time of year! At this time of day! In this part of the country! Localized entirely within Microsoft?!?
Yes.
May I see it?
No.
Site down, maybe they need port it to use Rust...
They use wordpress
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.
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
I'm wondering how they deal with long compilation times
As much as I like Rust. Still sad that F# didn't get this much support from their own mother.
Being technically approved by Microsoft is not a proof of quality...
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.
We don't learn Rust at school at all(both undergratuate and gratuate student)
i've never seen such a damning indictment of a language.
started learning rust using the rust programming language book last month!
NT kernel rewrite when?
ermm... which are the rust-native libs which enable winrt3.0 native apps?
… and they proved you can still write tier-10 software with it
So do we observe overall Microsoft software quality improvement so far?
VisualRust#
who cares. AI will translate brain waves to binary within 5 years.
It is a decompiled language.
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...