In recent years, Rust has emerged from relative obscurity to become one of the most talked-about and adopted programming languages in the tech industry. Recognized for its relentless focus on memory safety, unparalleled performance, and robust concurrency, Rust has captured the attention of some of the world's largest and most innovative companies. What started as a research project at Mozilla is now a fundamental tool in the software development arsenal of tech giants.
The adoption of Rust by leading companies is not a fleeting trend; it's a strategic decision driven by the need to build more reliable, efficient, and secure systems. Below, we explore how various companies are leveraging Rust's unique capabilities to solve complex challenges and optimize their critical infrastructures.
Amazon (AWS)
Amazon, through its cloud services arm, AWS, is one of Rust's biggest proponents and users. The company has invested significantly in the Rust ecosystem and uses it across several critical fronts:
Serverless Computing: AWS Lambda, its popular serverless function service, supports Rust as a first-class runtime. This allows developers to write highly efficient and resource-friendly Lambda functions, ideal for workloads requiring fast startup and predictable performance execution. Rust's efficiency directly translates to lower operational costs for AWS and its customers.
System-Level Programming: AWS uses Rust to develop low-level components of its cloud infrastructure. This includes hypervisors, drivers, and other tools that require precise control over hardware and memory. Rust's memory safety is a crucial advantage here, minimizing vulnerabilities that traditionally plague system software written in C or C++.
Networking Applications: Given the nature of its cloud services, Amazon relies heavily on high-performance networking applications. Rust is ideal for this domain due to its ability to handle concurrency safely and efficiently, allowing for the construction of proxies, load balancers, and other network components that can scale to meet the massive demands of its infrastructure.
Google has been a Rust enthusiast, incorporating it into several of its large-scale projects, often as a replacement for components previously written in C++ for security and performance reasons:
Chrome OS: While much of Chrome OS is written in C++, Google has begun integrating Rust-written components, especially in areas where low-level security and performance are paramount. This includes parts of the kernel and system tools.
Google Fuchsia: Fuchsia is Google's ambitious open-source operating system, designed from the ground up to be secure, updateable, and high-performance. Rust is a first-class language in Fuchsia, used to write many system components, from drivers to services. Rust's memory safety drastically reduces vulnerabilities in an operating system, a critical aspect for long-term security.
AOSP (Android Open Source Project): Google has announced plans to use Rust in Android development, focusing on memory safety to reduce the number of related errors, which constitute a significant portion of the operating system's vulnerabilities. This translates into a more secure and reliable Android system for billions of users.
Meta (Facebook)
Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has also heavily bet on Rust for its infrastructure:
Network Infrastructure: Meta operates one of the largest and most complex networks in the world. Rust is used to build tools and services that manage this infrastructure, optimizing the performance and reliability of its vast data centers.
Server Security: Security is a paramount concern for Meta. Rust is used to develop low-level security tools and server components where preventing memory vulnerabilities is critical to protecting user data and system integrity.
Rewrote their Python backend to Rust (Facebook): A notable case study is the rewriting of critical parts of their Python backend to Rust. This was done to improve performance and efficiency, as Rust can offer speed comparable to C++ with much superior memory safety, leading to fewer production errors and more efficient server resource utilization.
Discord
Discord, a popular communication platform for gamers and communities, has migrated crucial components to Rust to improve scalability and performance:
Rewrote their Read States service from Go to Rust: One of Discord's most critical services is the one that manages message "read states," allowing users to know which messages they have seen. This service was rewritten from Go to Go to Rust, resulting in significant improvements in latency and efficiency, allowing Discord to scale to its massive user base without compromising performance.
Scalability of 11 million concurrent users with Natively Implemented Functions (NIFs) from Elixir: Although Discord uses Elixir for its main backend, they have leveraged Rust's ability to create "NIFs" (Native Implemented Functions). These NIFs allow critical parts of business logic requiring extreme performance to be written in Rust and seamlessly integrated with the Elixir runtime, combining Elixir's productivity with Rust's efficiency.
Server Operations: Rust is also used in various server operations tools for tasks requiring fast and reliable execution, such as resource management or system monitoring.
Dropbox
Dropbox, a cloud storage and file synchronization platform, has been an early adopter of Rust, using it for core parts of its infrastructure:
File Sync: The heart of Dropbox is its file synchronization engine. Rust has been used to rewrite and optimize components of this engine due to its performance and safety. This ensures that synchronization is fast, reliable, and does not introduce memory errors that could corrupt user data.
Writing, Testing and Debugging your engine: Rust's robustness for writing complex engines, combined with its strict compile-time checks, significantly facilitates the writing, testing, and debugging of critical code. This translates to fewer bugs in production and a faster development cycle.
Comprehensive Compile-time Checks: One of Rust's biggest advantages is its compiler, which performs exhaustive memory safety and concurrency checks at compile time. This prevents an entire class of errors before the code reaches production, drastically reducing debugging time and improving overall reliability.
Disney
Even companies outside the purely technological sphere have found value in Rust, as is the case with Disney:
NCP GUI framework: Disney has used Rust to develop the graphical user interface framework for its "NCP" (Network Control Platform), an internal system. This suggests that Rust is being considered for desktop applications and internal systems that require performance and reliability.
m5 with WebAssembly (WASM): Disney has explored the use of Rust in conjunction with WebAssembly (WASM) for client-side and web development. Rust compiles to WASM very efficiently, allowing high-performance code to run directly in the browser, opening doors to richer and faster web experiences.
Web support for different platforms and devices: The combination of Rust and WASM gives Disney the ability to create high-performance code that can be consistently deployed across multiple platforms and devices via the web, which is vital for a company with such a diverse digital presence.
In the following image you can see visually how companies use Rust:
Final Thoughts
Rust's growing adoption by these leading companies underscores a clear trend: the tech industry increasingly values security, performance, and reliability. Rust, with its unique design features, has positioned itself as the preferred language for solving some of the most complex challenges in modern software engineering, from large-scale cloud infrastructures to operating systems and high-performance web applications.
Its future looks promising as more and more organizations discover the value of investing in a language that not only enables building robust systems but also fosters a safer and more efficient software development culture.
Top comments (2)
growth like this is always nice to see kinda makes me wonder what actually sticks for a language long-term culture or tooling or just the right people believing in it
What truly endures in a programming language are the people who adopt it with passion.
Tools and culture evolve, but without a community that believes in it and keeps it alive, it dies.
In the end, it's people who give soul and purpose to any technology.