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.

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-...

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...

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

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

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.