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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

> there are almost no major projects released that have been built in Rust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18545373

This includes Microsoft, which I forgot in that post, who uses it in production for their IOT product, and as part of Visual Studio Code.

That said, for crypto, there are some less than ideal things. That’s not stopping projects from working on it.

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> That’s not stopping projects from working on it.

To support that...

Grin contains a phenomenal amount of cryptography: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin

Bulletproofs implementation in rust (small proof sizes): https://github.com/dalek-cryptography/bulletproofs

...with tons of really well done cryptography by that group (dalek): https://github.com/dalek-cryptography

Pairing based crypto library used in the second largest distribution of Ethereum (and maybe zcash?): https://github.com/paritytech/bn

These libraries have prompted me to start learning rust (albeit slowly as I'm using Go and C at work).

To be clear, I did not claim no one was using it. "Almost no major projects" implies there there are a few major projects. It's a small set of projects, though, especially in comparison with something like C++.

Yep, that’s very much true. It’s been on a big upward trajectory lately. But that’s easy when you’re starting small :)

Microsoft might experiment with non-mainstream stuff, but in practice, most of the code in the company is still written in C++, C#, and lately, TypeScript. Much like other large corps, it has a lot of people proficient in certain technologies, and going for something exotic is rarely justifiable purely from the perspective of being able to maintain a team for such a project long-term.

Sure. I certainly don’t mean to imply Microsoft is now built on Rust.

But it is a big place, and some places do get to experiment.

Where is rust used in Code?

Rust isn't directly used in VSCode. VSCode makes use of ripgrep (a Rust-based replacement for grep), though.

Okay that’s what I thought. So that’s not really Microsoft “using Rust in production code” so much as one guy (I know him; he likes coconut la croix; I do too) deciding ripgrep would be a good basis for implementing the FileSearchProvider api.

The Code situation is the least strong; see the other sibling threads for more.

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