Microsoft has one of the largest C/C++ codebases in the world. All of its core products from Windows and Office to the Azure cloud run on it. Unsurprisingly, since C++ is not a memory-safe language, a lot of memory bugs popup in their codebase, and a lot of time has to be spent fixing them. Last year, Microsoft began looking at alternative programming languages that could help fix their memory safety issues. As a result of these pursuits, Microsoft has begun experimenting, and in some cases integrating, Rust into their codebase. Rust is a relatively new programming language that promises the same low-level performance of C and C++ with a feature set expected from a modern programming language. Microsoft thinks Rust has potential, and here is how they are integrating it into their products.
Rewriting Windows in Rust
Ok, they aren’t rewriting all of Windows in Rust just yet; but, they are interested in seeing how Rust will fit into its ecosystem. Microsoft determined that 70% of security patches pushed to computers are to fix memory-related bugs and believes that Rust would’ve been able to catch these bugs during the development phase. As a result, they tasked some engineers to rewrite some components of Windows in Rust to get some developer sentiment.
