Rust Is Tier-1 Language at Microsoft

(rustfoundation.org)

118 points | by mmastrac 1 hour ago

14 comments

  • meerita 29 minutes ago
    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-...
    • geodel 18 minutes ago
      But Tier-1 app consuming Tier-1 RAM seems officially approved.
  • petilon 7 minutes ago
    If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?
  • pjmlp 47 minutes ago
    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.

  • js8 27 minutes ago
    Is Microsoft still trying to embrace, extend, extinguish Netscape after all those years? :-)
  • swiftcoder 32 minutes ago
    I guess the big question is whether they are going to open up rustc_codegen_utc for use outside of Microsoft?
  • _joel 44 minutes ago
    Site down, maybe they need port it to use Rust...

    They use wordpress

    • seki285 8 minutes ago
      What is wrong with wordpress exactly?
    • echelon 29 minutes ago
      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.

      • tonyedgecombe 18 minutes ago
        I like Rust a lot but I'm not sure it would come very high up my list for web applications.
      • edukite 9 minutes ago
        First compile. Every another will be significantly faster since compiler is incremental
  • the__alchemist 31 minutes ago
    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 not a memory-safety one-trick pony; it's a well-rounded lang which has learned from its predecessors.
    • jdcasale 8 minutes ago
      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.

      • m00dy 6 minutes ago
        yeah, locks are expensive.
    • mgaunard 18 minutes ago
      All those applications area sensitive to asynchronous programming.
      • okanat 10 minutes ago
        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.
    • bigfishrunning 22 minutes ago
      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)

      • edukite 10 minutes ago
        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.

    • varjag 22 minutes ago
      Calculate ackermann(4,4), make no mistakes.
  • pornel 19 minutes ago
    The big news here is they've replaced LLVM with MSVC's backend.
  • ComputerGuru 48 minutes ago
    So when will we get tier 1 debugging support in Visual Studio?
    • flohofwoe 42 minutes ago
      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 ;)
      • Levitating 22 minutes ago
        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.
        • josephg 5 minutes ago
          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.

      • rafaelmn 38 minutes ago
        Debugger MCP better
        • josephg 1 minute ago
          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.

        • a012 30 minutes ago
          It’s all /skills now
    • pjmlp 45 minutes ago
      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.
    • mrec 44 minutes ago
      I'd also love to see MS sponsoring Windows support for a modern linker like mold or wild.
      • delta_p_delta_x 7 minutes ago
        lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe. Although the latter has incremental linking, which none of the Unix-like linker have.
  • mtgh2s 22 minutes ago
    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.
  • mgaunard 19 minutes ago
    does it mean there is a rust.net?
    • dralley 16 minutes ago
      There is a rustc_codegen_clr which transpiles to .NET

      https://github.com/fractalfir/rustc_codegen_clr

      • mgaunard 6 minutes ago
        > 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.

  • DidntUseIt 41 minutes ago
    Link doesn’t work.

    What’s a Tier 1 language?

    • gshubert17 34 minutes ago
      (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.

      • swiftcoder 15 minutes ago
        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"
    • flohofwoe 22 minutes ago
      It means it's about as good as C++ ;)
    • meindnoch 28 minutes ago
      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.

  • LazyIDE 38 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • calvbak 34 minutes ago
    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.