Rust is a 99% solution to a 1% problem.
And the situations where you really need a "systems programming" environment have been really at best a wash with Rust. It's mostly replacing boring middleware (c.f. the linked article). Where are the rustacean routing engines and database backends and codecs and kernels? Not in deployment anywhere, not yet. C still rules that world, even for new features.
[1] Well, everything big enough to need a typesafe high performance platform. The real "everything", to first approximation, should be in python.
That might be true. I personally still prefer to use a language with sum-types and exhaustive pattern matching for encoding business logic.
> and much cheaper to maintain.
[citation needed]
> Where are the rustacean routing engines and database backends and codecs and kernels? Not in deployment anywhere, not yet.
It is used at Amazon on Firecracker, S3, EC2, CloudFront, Route 53, and that's just what was publicly talked about in 2020[0].
It is used in Android, including in the Kernel[1].
It is used at Microsoft, including in the Kernel[2].
It is used extensively in Firefox, and less extensively in Chrome. JPEG XL might be reincorporated into them because there's a Rust codec in the works.
For databases, the earliest I remember is TiKV[3], which hit 1.0 back in 2018. There are others since.
> C still rules that world, even for new features.
Sure. So?
[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/why-aws-loves-rust-a...
[1]: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...
[2]: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/282471/microsoft-is-rewriti...
Keep in mind that one requirement is being able to create things like Embassy.
In a different universe rust still does not have async and in 5 years it might get an ocaml-style effect system.
From 2023:
> In that regard, async/await has been phenomenally successful. Many of the most prominent sponsors of the Rust Foundation, especially those who pay developers, depend on async/await to write high performance network services in Rust as one of their primary use cases that justify their funding.