Microsoft encourages Windows driver development in Rust for better security

The Rust programming language has become quite popular over the past few years. In May 2023, Microsoft promised to introduce Rust in the Windows 11 kernel, and it delivered on that promise very soon with Dev Channel build 25905 in July 2023. Linux has also tried embracing Rust, but its ride has been comparatively bumpy. Now, spurred by the improvements brought by introducing Rust in its development workflows, Microsoft has encouraged Windows driver authors to write code using Rust.

In a blog post, Microsoft has emphasized that writing safe code for drivers is critical since they are low-level components which communicate directly with the hardware. The Surface team is already contributing actively to the open-source windows-drivers-rs project, which is also being leveraged to ship drivers written in Rust to Surface devices. The team says that this approach is not only improving the security and reliability of Surface devices, but it's also "raising the security bar for the entire Windows ecosystem".

There are numerous benefits of using Rust for writing Windows drivers. Its primary selling point is memory safety, the lack of which is a huge problem in traditional programming languages like C++ and C, which are typically used to write drivers. Other advantages include strict type checks, concurrency safety, static analysis capabilities, compile-time abstractions, and interoperability with traditional programming languages.

This is why Microsoft wants other developers to contribute to the windows-drivers-rs initiative on GitHub too. It contains crates, samples, documentation, and guides, powered by an active community. In terms of what's next for this initiative, Microsoft has promised platform enhancements, advancements in feature parity between Rust and the Windows Driver Kit (WDK), and expanded availability of open-source abstractions. It will be interesting to see if Rust becomes mainstream when it comes to writing drivers for Windows across its diverse hardware ecosystem.

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Posted Friday 25 July 2025 at 12:08 pm AEST (my time).

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