Overall, there’s been some interesting developments trending in the Rust ecosystem, pointing towards positive growth opportunities and a bright future for the well-loved language.

It's been a big week for Rust. The programming language is currently in discussions to be included in the Linux kernel. Meanwhile, after seeing massive performance improvements, PostgresML is moving to Rust for their 2.0 release, and the CTO of Microsoft Azure has endorsed its usage over C and C++.

Linux and Rust: Together at last

According to an article on ZDNet by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, said: “Unless something odd happens, it [Rust] will make it into 6.1.”

There have been active discussions about this potential decision since 2020. Currently, there is still much work to be done. You can view the GitHub issue and track the unstable Rust features needed for the kernel.

From Steven Vaughan-Nichols’s ZDNet article:

“...with the new Rust Linux NVMe driver, over 70 extensions needed to be made to Rust to get it working. But, Torvalds had told me in an earlier interview, “We've been using exceptions to standard C for decades.”

Now, the Linux and Rust community is in discussion about what it means for Rust to join the Linux kernel, at long last. Would this level of language endorsement lead to more language adoption, and therefore, more career opportunities for Rust developers?

Rust endorsement from Mark Russinovich

On September 20, 2022 Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, tweeted:

Speaking of languages, it's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required. For the sake of security and reliability. the industry should declare those languages as deprecated.

Naturally, this prompted discussion and debate among developers from both the C and C++ and Rust ecosystems. Now that Rust will be included in the Linux kernel, it stands in stark contrast to C++, which Linus Torvalds has previously called “such a bad language” and will not implement into the kernel.

PostgresML moving to Rust

PostgresML version 2.0 is currently in the planning stage, and according to a blog post by Montana Low, the team will be moving to Rust for the 2.0 release.

The end-to-end machine learning platform uses pure SQL to create and deploy prediction models. PostgresML needs to be fast, and benchmark tests using 10,000 random embeddings and 128 dimensions proved to the team that Rust is the best possible language for optimal performance.

Spoiler alert: idiomatic Rust is about 10x faster than native SQL, embedded PL/pgSQL, and pure Python. Rust comes close to the hand-optimized assembly version of the Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS) implementation. NumPy is supposed to provide optimizations in cases like this, but it's actually the worst performer.”

The huge improvement is clear. Rust and machine learning with vast amounts of data are a great match.

A strong community

For seven years, Rust has continuously ranked as the number one most loved language in the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey. With a booming developer community on the Rust Users Forum, Discord, IRC, and GitHub, Rustaceans are quick to evangelize the language.

The fan-favorite is used in production at companies like Firefox, Amazon, Discord, Yelp, and Dropbox.