I've seen news that Microsoft is adopting Rust for safe systems programming. I believe they've been investing in Rust for a while.

- https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...

- https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

- https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/micro...

It's also very in-character for them to push for safer languages. They have quite successfully pushed C# over C++ for Windows software development, and pushed more and more static analysis into (c/c++) Windows driver development.

Yep. And at MS Research they've had various projects focusing on safe languages over the past couple decades (the time I've paid attention to it, probably more research preceding that).

It would make sense for MS to be interested in an existing, popular, relatively mature language that possessed many of the safety features their research languages have explored.

I think Joe Duffy mentioned somewhere that if Rust was around when they started Midori, that would have been their option instead of creating System C# (aka M#), but I cannot find that quote.

There are a smattering (36 right now) of job openings on their career site that mention rust: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/search-results?keywords=... A few seem to be boilerplate lists of languages, but some actually mention a preference for candidates that know rust. My read on this is that there are probably some small teams (looks like in Azure) that use rust. But I don't see a big company-wide push yet--there would be a lot more open positions if so.

There are teams that are big into Rust and are hiring for it. They seem to be mostly in Windows and Azure, which makes sense: both have a huge need for safety and reliability (moreso than other areas).

But Windows has been around for 35 years; it's a huge C++ codebase, so trying to turn that ship takes time. And just as you can't wholesale rewrite Linux in Rust, it'll take time to integrate Rust into the OS. I assume Azure is a bit easier since there are new services coming online all the time that aren't necessarily dependent on others. I imagine that as these safety- and performance-critical 'experiments' take off, you'll see other teams investing in a big way. (FD: I'm in the Windows org but don't have any sort of special knowledge of the decision calculus here.)

Microsoft has been using Rust in shipping products since at least 2018.

The reason may be that just like Mozilla Foundation, they may be tired of dealing with bugs such as buffer overflow, integer overflow, undefined behaviours and use-after-free which are responsible for most security vulnerabilities that still haunts C and C++.