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Comment by vander_elst | Hacker News Reader

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vander_elst·

What's the strategy behind this move? Is MS adding some Rust APIs to some of their products?

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They are starting to rewrite Windows components in Rust [1] and are also founding members of the foundation.

[1] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/11/07/using-rust-in-win...

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that MS see Rust as a strategic “safer C” going forward. They have tons of legacy, dangerous C/C++ code across their traditional products (and Windows in particular), which could be slowly replaced with more robust Rust implementations.

Until Rust is replaced with something else (perhaps steel-lang or carbon-nanotube-lang). :)

Rust also fits perfectly into their general desire for robust drivers, for example with the Static Driver Verifier [1]. If a device driver misbehaves people usually blame Windows, so they spend energy on reducing the classes of bugs that can happen.

1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...

Microsoft's c codebase is heavily annotated with custom annotations they check at compile time. It's not as powerful as Rust, but very cool.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/code-quality/using-sal-...

They released a while back Rust crate for Windows API: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/micro...

They are one of the founding member of Rust Foundation, and from the article it seems that they do use Rust in some of their products.

Partly they probably just want people to be able to use different languages on their OS. They have similar guides for Go and Java for example.

Amazon, Google, MS and Huawei are Rust foundation members.

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