Microsoft is turning to Rust to safeguard some of its most crucial core code

Memory-safe code is the aim of the game

Rust is now beginning to reach Windows developers as Microsoft looks to safeguard some of its most important core code.

Windows Director of OS Security David Weston explained that Windows would boot with Rust in the “next several weeks or months,” and true to his word, the company has been rewriting core libraries in the memory-safe code.

He continued to explain the company’s goal of converting C++ data types into their Rust equivalents, proclaiming “very few calls to unsafe code” in a nod to the company’s success.

Rust for Windows

Memory-safe code has been a growing topic for discussion in recent years, given the potential for bugs in code to affect any electronic device running software or firmware. Rust is designed to help prevent exploitable code from being shipped in the first place, making Windows, in this case, more secure.

Microsoft’s commitment to Rust isn’t unique, with Google already having announced its readiness for the coding language two years ago in Android, stating that “memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most-difficult-to-address source of incorrectness.” Rust joined Kotlin and Java in the Android Open Source Project.

DWriteCore in Windows 10 and above has already been part of the Rust revolution, and now has substantially more lines of Rust code than C++.

The move to Rust is one that sees the company’s developers tackling the OS’s oldest challenges, according to Weston, who hinted at a more secure future for Windows.

At the Tel Aviv presentation (opens in new tab), he explained that “as much as we love Rust, we know it’s probably not the solution to rewrite the last 40 years of C and C++ code in Rust,” indicating that “broader approaches” may spell out a future whereby Rust may not be the be-all-and-end-all solution.

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