Rust Is Tier-1 Language at Microsoft
rustfoundation.orgGood 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-...
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.)
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"? :)
> 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.)
Looking at the current Microsoft trends, both Sally and Todd would be let go and replaced with H1B Sandeep, Subhrajeet, Ramalingam, and Srinikumar, who would then oversee a remote team split between Bangalore and Mumbai.
Microsoft stopped caring about quality a long time ago.
The problem is the Webview2 prevalence, and note many Rust projects love their webviews as well.
But Tier-1 app consuming Tier-1 RAM seems officially approved.
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.
If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?
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.
Visual Studio does have a really nice C++ debugger - one would imagine the C++ debugging capabilities should translate to Rust.
The big news here is they've replaced LLVM with MSVC's backend.
So when will we get tier 1 debugging support in Visual Studio?
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 ;)
The greybeards rarely used debuggers, and then only to see the stack trace of a core file. They found printf better.
I can't find my copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming but that is what I recall it says. Those authors are the best known greybeards.
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.
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.
Debugger MCP better
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.
It’s all /skills now
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.
I'd also love to see MS sponsoring Windows support for a modern linker like mold or wild.
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.
I guess the big question is whether they are going to open up rustc_codegen_utc for use outside of Microsoft?
Is Microsoft still trying to embrace, extend, extinguish Netscape after all those years? :-)
You’ll know when they publish Visual R++ or Rust.NET.
Don't forget about R#
I was originally going to write that, but R# already exists: https://rsharp.net/ (based on https://www.r-project.org/)
I guess we should watch for contributions to Servo
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.
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.
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.
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)yeah, locks are expensive.
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.
All those applications area sensitive to asynchronous programming.
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.
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)
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.
Calculate ackermann(4,4), make no mistakes.
ermm... which are the rust-native libs which enable winrt3.0 native apps?
Site down, maybe they need port it to use Rust...
They use wordpress
What is wrong with wordpress exactly?
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.
Matt Mullenweg
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.
I like Rust a lot but I'm not sure it would come very high up my list for web applications.
First compile. Every another will be significantly faster since compiler is incremental
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.
Now their broken slop code is at least memory safe.
does it mean there is a rust.net?
There is a rustc_codegen_clr which transpiles to .NET
> 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.
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
Link doesn’t work.
What’s a Tier 1 language?
(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.
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"
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.
The answer I deserved!
It means it's about as good as C++ ;)
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
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.