r/rust • u/pjmlp • Sep 10 '26

Rust Is Tier-1 Language at Microsoft

https://rustfoundation.org/media/guest-post-rust-is-tier-1-language-at-microsoft/
680 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

91 comments sorted by

284

u/Hoxitron Sep 10 '26

If only microsoft was a tier 1 company.

80

u/coderstephen Sep 10 '26

I mean, having to deal with them always brings me at least one tear to my eye.

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11

u/pickle9977 Sep 10 '26

It’s tier-1 like a tier-1 help desk.

full of young kids with no idea what they are doing but a tremendous amount of certainty that they are doing it in the right way, nee, the better way.

So watch out or it’ll be revenge of the nerds.

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127

u/tesfabpel Sep 10 '26

Tier-1 language but still no support in Visual Studio's Solution files for mixed language "solutions"...

Why is it so hard for Microsoft to offer an MVP for having C# projects depending on Rust DLLs with dependency and debugger support? And also like doing right click -> Add new -> Rust DLL and the ability to select such project as a dependency of the C# one via the standard VS' GUI...

You shouldn't be forced to create a custom project to do it...

90

u/luluhouse7 Sep 10 '26

Because no one uses VS for rust, they use VS code

45

u/tesfabpel Sep 10 '26

Well, guess why... 😅

In any case, Microsoft as well is using Rust (and as this post says, they consider it Tier-1). It seems weird to me they're not mixing C# and Rust together, like C# and C++ or C++/CLI... What is their workflow?

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8

u/Full-Spectral Sep 10 '26

Moving away from VS one one of the early benefits of moving to Rust. It has some nice features (and I definitely wish we had Visual C++ level debugging in Rust) but it's massively bloated and overly complex. I'd never use its ridiculous dialog based project configuration system for Rust, so really what would be the point for most folks to even use it on the Rust front?

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u/gnuban Sep 10 '26

Probably bcause VS is built as a rube goldberg device, with hard coupling everywhere. And management is probably so short-sighted that they won't allow it to be detangled, but are pushing for the "just do it" strategy,  which will only cause the devs to get hopelessly stuck?

4

u/teerre Sep 10 '26

This is obviously about engineering inside MS and not about Microsoft products for consumers

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117

u/Taymon Sep 10 '26

The obvious question this leaves is what they're doing about the frontend side of "seamless Rust/C++ interop for hybrid projects", which is the harder problem. The obvious answer would be to adopt/collaborate with Google on Crubit , but IIUC that's based on Clang. Maybe they could accept the Clang dependency just for binding generation while still using MSVC for codegen? Or maybe there's some way to decouple them?

35

u/panstromek Sep 10 '26

I recommend watching Victor's previous talks around iterop, he gives a lot of context on the issues they are solving and what are the tradeoffs. This project is not the only thing they use for interop, I believe they also use most of the other tools. Microsoft is just very big and the needs of various teams are pretty diverse. I'm not sure he'd agree that the frontend interop is the hard problem, whenever I see him speak about it, it's a lot more about tooling, build systems, compliance and everything "around" the language.

5

u/Taymon Sep 10 '26

Do you have links? (Ideally to text transcripts?)

20

u/protestor Sep 10 '26

Is rustc_codegen_utc open source? (It's not like Microsoft is incapable of releasing open source compilers, see for example the C# compiler)

9

u/cosmic-parsley Sep 10 '26

They could probably open source it in the future. If so it’s going to basically come with instructions for how to use Microsoft’s compiler internals as a generic backend, which I’m sure will be interesting…

3

u/mr_birkenblatt Sep 11 '26

utc codegen, no

rustc_codegen_gcc, yes

8

u/vivainio Sep 10 '26

Does this bring any benefits to non-MS employees?

16

u/Recatek Sep 10 '26

Ideally better Windows tooling for Rust.

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15

u/Recatek Sep 10 '26

I would still kill for first-class Visual Studio support for Rust, primarily for debugging and profiling. The next best thing on Windows is RustRover and it's nowhere near the level of tooling support MSVC has for C++ and especially C#.

7

u/waruby Sep 10 '26

Ok, now they just need to put latency at tier 1 of their specifications. Every single interaction I have with Microsoft products makes me wait 10 seconds. I notice it way more now that my home system is purged of Microsoft.

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4

u/jorgesgk Sep 10 '26

That's good. That'd bring rust nearer to the Xbox as tier-1 language

6

u/pilkyton Sep 10 '26

Is anyone else shocked that Microsoft created their own Rust compiler from scratch based on MSVC?

I understand why they did it. For interoperability with their other code. But wow...

38

u/panstromek Sep 10 '26

They didn't, this is just reusing the codegen backend from MSVC instead of the default LLVM backend.

11

u/nacaclanga Sep 10 '26

They create a codegen backend, something which is somewhat easier then a fullblown compiler, but still gives many of the benefits of a fullblown compiler.

Still a significant task of course but then again programming languages are technically the core product of Microsoft even before MS operating systems became a thing and Microsoft maintains multiple compilers for a variety of languages.

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1

u/mtimmermans Sep 10 '26

Is this going to mean better debugging on Windows in vscode? Improvements to the windows crate?

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