https://rustmagazine.org/issue-1/2022-review-the-adoption-of-rust-in-business/
2022
Review | The adoption of Rust in Business
Preface
The year
2022 marks seven years since the stable version of the Rust language was
officially released. Since its release, Rust has been popular among developers.
In a Stack Overflow poll of over 73,000 developers from 180 countries, Rust was
voted the most popular programming language for the seventh consecutive year,
with 87% of developers expressing a desire to use it.
2022 also marks the second year of the existence of
the Rust Foundation, which was founded on February
9, 2021. At its inception, there were only five founding platinum members:
Mozilla, Amazon, Huawei, Google, and Microsoft. Today, in December 2022, the
Rust Foundation has 39 headline companies from various industries as members,
working towards the implementation of Rust in their respective domains.
The number of Rust developers continues to grow,
including both startups building products from scratch and established
companies looking to improve their operations. According to a report by
developer research and analysis company SlashData, titled “The 22nd State of the
Developer Nation,” the number of Rust users increased from 600,000
to 2.2 million from Q1 2020 to Q1 2022. Additionally, the TIOBE programming language list for November
2022 ranked Rust in the top 20.
It can be safely concluded that 2022 was a year of
widespread adoption for the Rust language. In this article, let’s examine the
state of Rust adoption in business.
How
Rust is adopted by Rust Foundation members
The Rust
Foundation members, particularly the Platinum members, are adopting Rust by
investing in its sustainability. They believe that Rust should be used to
create sustainable and energy-efficient solutions that are also safe. This
investment supports the long-term viability of the language.
Platinum
Members Embrace Rust
At AWS,
Rust has quickly become a crucial tool for building large-scale infrastructure
at AWS. In 2018, the open-source virtualization technology Firecracker was publicly released, and it
powers AWS Lambda and other serverless products. AWS
uses Rust to provide services such as Amazon Simple Storage
Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront, among others.
In 2020, Bottlerocket, a Linux-based container
operating system written in Rust, was launched. The Amazon EC2 team has also
adopted Rust as the preferred language for developing new AWS Nitro System components, including
sensitive applications like Nitro Enclaves for
secure and isolated EC2 environments that handle confidential data.
Furthermore, over the past year, Amazon Prime Video has
leveraged WASM and egui to enhance its application and deliver
content to millions of customers across 8,000+ device types, such as game
consoles, TVs, set-top boxes, and streaming media. The investment in Rust and
WebAssembly has paid off with 37,000 lines of Rust code written during a year
of development, resulting in improved performance, stability, reduced CPU
consumption, and lower memory usage.“
Google has applied Rust to Chromium, Android, and
Fuchsia OS, with Chromium’s support for Rust being experimental. Developers can
use Rust to develop components for Android and Fuchsia OS, and
Rust is used in a significant proportion of the internal code of Android and
Fuchsia OS, particularly with Fuchsia OS where the Rust code has surpassed 50%.
Due to its large amount of internal Cpp code, Google has worked with Meta
(formerly Facebook) to adopt cxx for secure interaction with Cpp. In
October of this year, Google introduced a new secure operating system called
KataOS based on the open-source RISC-V chip. Sparrow is the reference implementation of
KataOS and runs on seL4, almost entirely written in Rust. The
operating system is not designed for desktop computers or smartphones, but
rather for the Internet of Things and may be used for smart home devices. The
goal is to build a verifiable secure operating systems
for embedded hardware or edge devices, such as network-connected cameras that
capture images that are processed on the device or in the cloud for machine
learning. In the latest released version of Android 13, Google also announced
that approximately 21% of the new native code (C/C++/Rust) in Android version 13
is Rust. The AOSP has about 1.5 million lines of Rust code, covering new
features and components. Additionally, so far, zero memory safety vulnerabilities
have been found in Android’s Rust code. In order to achieve the goal of
increasing security, stability, and quality within Android, the Android team
says that Rust should be used anywhere in the codebase where native code is
needed.
Huawei aims to drive the evolution of communication
system software towards being secure and trustworthy, and the Rust language
plays a significant role in this pursuit. The company plans to migrate some of
its C/C++ code to enhance performance and security simultaneously. To support
this process, Huawei provides developers with automated tools, such as the
open-source C2Rust translation tool, which first generates Rust code from C
code and then automatically refactors it using source-to-source transformation
tools. Huawei has also made several important contributions to the Rust
community, such as code submissions for the Rust compiler that allow for the
support of the ARM AArch64 32-bit big-end variant ILP32 chipset
used in Huawei’s communication products, enabling Huawei and its partners to
run Rust native programs on these common network hardware architectures. The
contributions have been submitted to the LLVM compiler, libc library, libc library, and Rust compiler by Huawei’s Rust expert Amanieu
d’Antras. Huawei engineer YuanLi has also made
numerous contributions to Rust, including fixing program bugs,
optimizing the compiler’s parallel compilation efficiency, and leading the Rust Compiler
Parallel Compilation Working Group in 2022 to contribute to
accelerating parallel compilation of the Rust compiler.
In 2016, Meta (formerly Facebook) adopted Rust as
its “new secure programming language for blockchain,” utilizing it for the Diem
(formerly Libra) stablecoin blockchain, the Mononoke source control server, and
as the primary language for Meta. This was a significant decision, as most of
Meta’s backend code was written in C++. However, after the perceived success of
Mononoke, the adoption of Rust gained momentum, attracting engineers with
backgrounds in Python and JavaScript. Today, Rust is a major supported
server-side language alongside Hack, C++, and Python, and Meta
recommends it for writing CLI tools and performance-sensitive backend services.
To further support its use, Meta created an internal boot camp for Rust
engineers.
Microsoft has one of the largest collections of
code in the world that is written in C/C++, which is used in all its core
products such as Windows, Office, and Azure cloud. In 2019, Microsoft started
exploring memory-safe programming languages and introduced Rust as a trial. The
Rust for Windows library was then
open-sourced on GitHub, allowing Rust developers to work smoothly with the
Windows API.
In 2022, Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Microsoft Azure,
stated that C and C++ should no
longer be used for new projects. He suggested that Rust should be used for projects
that require a non-GC language for improved safety and reliability. He made
this statement on Twitter as his personal opinion and not as a new Microsoft
policy.
In September 2022, JFrog became a
Platinum Member of the Rust Foundation. As a DevOps platform provider, JFrog
supports multiple major programming languages and aims to identify and
eliminate security threats to the Rust platform and ecosystem, as well as
fixing platform issues to prevent further risk. With the growing cybersecurity
threats from the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data, the
use of Rust programming language has tripled to 2.2 million developers in the
last two years.
Gold
Members Embrace Rust
Shopify, a
Canadian multinational e-commerce company, joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold
member in December 2022. The company has been using the Ruby language for
server-side programming, but since 2021, Shopify has been using Rust to develop
YJIT, a new CRuby Instant
(JIT) compiler that was merged into Ruby 3.1. In a performance
test, YJIT outperformed CRuby by 38%. Shopify has also decided to
adopt Rust as the company’s system programming language for high-performance
web servers due to its consistency,
performance, community ecology, productivity, security, and interoperability.
Silver
Members and General Sponsors Embrace Rust
The Rust
Foundation’s Silver membership has expanded to include 28 companies from a
range of industries. Additionally, there are three non-member general sponsors,
whose adoption of Rust will be discussed in the “How the Industry Adopted Rust”
section of the article.
How
startups adopt Rust
2022 can
also be considered a year of growth for Rust startups. This year, several
startups based on Rust technology have received substantial funding.
Fermyon
Fermyon
Technologies was one of the first Rust startups to experience
success in 2022. In October, the company announced that it
had received $20 million in Series A funding and launched the Fermyon Cloud
platform. Fermyon Cloud is designed to simplify the deployment of WebAssembly-based
applications and microservices. With Fermyon’s Spin build tool, based on a Rust
implementation, developers can compile and package applications for
WebAssembly, and then deploy them to Fermyon Cloud. This eliminates the need
for developers to have knowledge of the underlying infrastructure, as Fermyon’s
toolchain handles all configuration and deployment steps.
WebAssembly is optimized for security and low
resource consumption, and by bringing it into the server environment,
applications can enjoy the same benefits while being deployed to various
environments using a common codebase. Fermyon aims to provide a solution
similar to Java’s “write once, run anywhere” with the ease of use of Heroku.
This reduces friction in application development by eliminating the need for
developers to worry about infrastructure.
Fermyon’s CEO, Matt Butcher, stated that with
Fermyon Spin and Fermyon Cloud, developers can create and deploy applications
in less than two minutes, fulfilling the promise of rapid development,
deployment, and execution in the cloud through WebAssembly.
Warp
Warp
is a new generation terminal emulator that aims to improve developer
productivity. It has <a style="max-width:100%;color:blue;text-decoration:underline">received $23 million in
funding</a> and launched its public beta on April 5, 2022. Warp uses the
Rust language and technology stack, including WebAssembly, to provide
cross-platform support. The UI rendering is done using the GPU through the
Metal API on MacOS, chosen due to the platform’s popularity among developers
and the availability of excellent debugging tools. The Rust GPU support is
currently not perfect, so the team worked with Nathan Sobo to use a
Flutter-inspired Rust UI framework, which will be open-sourced soon. In the
future, more rendering backends will be supported. Although Warp is a
commercial product and does not open source the entire code, it has contributed
some tools and libraries to the open-source community.
Database
field startups
This
year has seen an influx of startups in the database field.
In April 2022, Jon Gjengset, a well-known developer
in the Rust community, was announced as a co-founder of ReadySet,
Inc.. He aimed to bring his PhD thesis on Noria databases to life as
ReadySet, a SQL caching engine for databases that helps developers build
high-performance and real-time applications without having to change code or
switch databases. Currently, the company is raising $29 million in
Series A funding.
In April 2022, Singularity Data(Singularity Unlimited), a
database startup that raised $10 million, announced the open source Rust
implementation of its cloud-native SQL-enabled streaming database called
RisingWave. Originally created in C++ in early 2021, the database was rewritten
in Rust seven months later. This was a bold move for an early-stage startup,
particularly in a competitive industry where time is a critical factor for
technology startups.
Streaming
Service
InfinyOn,
a real-time event streaming company, has raised $5 million in seed funding from
investors including Gradient Ventures, Fly Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners,
and TSVC. The company uses Fluvio, a dynamic data programmability platform
developed in Rust, which is growing in popularity among developers and the open
source community.
According to Sehyo Chang, co-founder and CTO of
InfinyOn, traditional data platforms built in the Java era are cumbersome,
require a lot of memory, and are difficult to operate, making real-time
decisions challenging. InfinyOn eliminates the need for ETL tools, providing a
cost-effective and secure platform with up to 80 times less memory usage.
Chris Brucker, CEO of Nammu, mentions that InfinyOn
makes it easier for teams to integrate healthcare data from multiple sources,
such as IoT, patient input, and physician input. This is because InfinyOn is
written in Rust, which makes it easier to integrate compared to other solutions
such as Kafka.
Early adopters of InfinyOn are already seeing
significant advantages over other solutions, including ease of use, faster
development, and a lower total cost of ownership. Despite being in Beta,
InfinyOn is already proving its worth in its proof-of-concept stage.
How
the industry adopted Rust
Software
Defined Vehicles: The Critical Role of Rust
In
April, the automotive standards organization Autosar, whose members include
major companies such as Ford, GM, BMW, Bosch, Volkswagen, Toyota, and Deliver,
announced the formation of a new subgroup within its working group on
Functional Safety (WG-SAF) to explore the use of Rust in one of its reference platforms.
SAE International has also established a working group to examine Rust for
safety-related systems in the automotive industry. In May, Autosar and the Rust
team held an exchange to
determine if Safe Rust could meet the requirements for use in the automotive
space, specifically discussing the Ferrocene Rust safe subset.
However, Autosar later withdrew their announcement
of the new Rust working group , possibly due to the pending results of the
Ferrocene Rust project. In September, Julius Gustavsson, a technologist and
system architect at Volvo Cars, stated in an interview that he
is pushing for the development of Rust at Volvo.
Ferrocene
Rust Security Subset
Ferrocene Systems
and AdaCore announced
in February that they are partnering to develop Ferrocene, a security-compliant
Rust toolchain designed to meet the needs of various regulated markets, such as
automotive, avionics, space, and rail. This will involve certifying the
Ferrocene Rust compiler to ASIL level D, the highest level of automotive
hazard, according to various safety standards. It will also involve developing
and qualifying the necessary dynamic and static analysis tools, language
support (libcore), and other user libraries. The goal is to support Rust as
comprehensively as any other programming language relevant to high-integrity
application development, targeting various architectures and operating systems
relevant to these markets. The Ferrocene Language
Specification is currently under development and is expected to be
released by the end of the year.
Others
Among
the Silver members of the Rust Foundation is ARM, which is
also working to bring the use of Rust to software-defined vehicles.
Instant
Messaging: Threema
Threema
is a cross-platform, privacy-secure and open source instant messaging tool.
Password
management tool: 1Password
1Password,
a password management tool, adopted Rust early on to build its Windows client.
In 2019, the company ported its logic
engine with browser extension support from Go to Rust, marking the
start of its cross-platform adoption of Rust. By November 2022, 1Password had
also open-sourced its Typeshare library, which helps developers generate consistent data types across
multiple languages and facilitates secure cross-platform
development.
GUI
: Targeting the QT market
The two
partners of tQCS, a world-leading company in Qt consulting and UI/UX design
services, have become Silver members of the Rust Foundation.
They are KDAB, with
expertise in embedded systems, 3D graphics, and cross-platform development,
They’re working on cxx-qt to make using Qt and Rust
together much easier.
Slint, which simplifies GUI
development for embedded platforms and supports various programming languages
including Rust and JavaScript. Both companies are significant contributors to
the Qt project, with Slint’s founder being the main developer of the QtQml
engine.
Cloud
storage: Dropbox
Dropbox
was one of the early adopters of Rust, utilizing it in the development of its
file sync engine. The company has continued to innovate with Rust, using it in
the development of Dropbox Capture, a new visual
communication tool designed to make it easier for teams to share their work
through asynchronous methods such as screen recordings, video messages,
screenshots, or GIFs.
Edge
Computing: Cloudflare
Cloudflare uses Rust in its core edge logic to
replace memory-unsafe C language. Its Cloudflare Workers platform supports both
Rust and WebAssembly. In September, the company also announced that it was
using Rust to develop Pingora, a proxy
server that has the potential to replace Nginx.
Walt
Disney Company (Disney)
The
Disney Company is using Rust to build its NCP GUI framework. This was concluded
from a Disney job posting and
the company’s 2021 release,“Introducing the Disney+
Application Development Kit (ADK)”. The use of Rust in the
development of the Native Client Platform v2 (NCPv2) framework, codenamed “m5”,
was primarily to target WebAssembly (WASM) for easier web
deployment and application updatability. The project, which has been ongoing
for nearly three years, has reached a point where the same rendering engine is
used to render animations across all platforms, from handheld terminals to TVs,
web pages, etc.
Tesla
While Elon Musk tweeted
in February that he is a fan of the Rust language, he admitted that Tesla
primarily uses C++ and Python. However, two job postings for Rust developers at
Tesla, released in November, suggest that the company is starting to adopt
Rust. The first is for the Tesla Robotics Simulation
Engine team, which is seeking Rust developers to enhance the
high-performance robot simulation engine, which is already written in Rust. The
second is for a Rust Firmware Verification
Engineer, where having experience with Rust is preferred but not
mandatory.
Tweedegolf:
with SpaceX Spacecraft
Rust is
taking flight. Gama Solar Sail is set to launch a solar sail
spaceship, making it one of the companies that is publicly sending Rust into
space. Tweedegolf, a software services company and a
Silver member of the Rust Foundation, is providing the necessary services for
the launch. They have an open source repository
that includes a library of Rust implementations of the Precision Time Protocol
(PTP), which is more accurate than NTP and is used in satellite time sources.
Although it is a proof-of-concept implementation, it is unknown if it will be
used on the spacecraft. The embedded development board PCF85063A rust driver,
used for timing alarm clocks, suggests that the Rust program on board the
satellite will likely be related to precise timing. On January 3, 2023, the Gama
Solar Sail satellite was successfully placed into orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9
rocket.
Lightyear
Solar Car Company Adopts Rust
As
revealed on Tweedegolf’s blog,
a software architect at Lightyear named Jorrit shared at a High Tech Industry Rust
gathering organized by Tweedegolf how the company is using Rust in
the development of its core platform. Due to privacy concerns, no video or
PowerPoint of the presentation was made available to the public.
File
Data Storage: Qumulo
Qumulo,
a leader in hybrid cloud file data management, has partnered with Western
Digital to enable the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to
process up to 2 petabytes of data per day. This is achieved by deploying the
Qumulo scalable file data platform, which is based on Western Digital’s
Ultrastar high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) and high-performance
solid-state drives (SSDs). This partnership is aimed at advancing public epidemiological
research, statistics, and forecasting. Qumulo is also sponsoring the RustConf
2022 conference.
Veteran
database company: PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
sponsored the RustConf 2022 conference, but there is no evidence of them using
Rust within the company. However, there is a GitHub project called pgx, which is dedicated to writing PostgreSQL
extensions using Rust. The core developer Ana’s blog also features numerous articles
about it.
Enterprise
Data Analytics: Redjack
Redjack
claims technology from the U.S. National Intelligence Agency that monitors and
protects more than 8% of the Internet’s public IP space and more than 100
trillion business communications each year, increasing actionable data that
enables organizations to improve the speed and accuracy of analysis for the
security and resilience of large-scale operations. Redjack is also sponsoring
the RustConf 2022 conference, so it is likely that the company will also adopt
Rust.
Data
Science & AI
Rust
Foundation Silver members also include companies in the data science and AI
sector, such as Watchful. Watchful tags data for AI at a speed
and scale that traditional tagging solutions can’t match.
Automotive
IoT
Wyliodrin
protects devices and builds secure and efficient systems using Rust, Tock OS, and Android. They launched the
Rust-based embedded real-time operating system Tock OS into commercial
applications, and the company has joined the Rust Foundation as a Silver member.
Messaging
Push Service Provider: OneSignal
OneSignal,
a messaging push provider, has been using Rust since 2017 to support push
notifications, email, SMS, and in-app self-service customer engagement
solutions. The company provides a Rust Client for these services.
Automated
Freight Trains: Parallel Systems
Parallel
Systems, a company that develops zero-emission automated electric
freight trains, believes that the future of freight transportation lies in
rail. To support this vision, the company has built its technology stack using
the Rust language. As a sponsor of the RustConf 2022 conference, Parallel
Systems is further demonstrating its commitment to the use of Rust in its
operations.
Rust
Development Tools, Platforms and Toolchain Support
Good
development tools that are implemented in Rust include:
- tabnine, a machine learning-based code
autocompletion tool.
- Open Source Security, a member of the
Rust Foundation as a Silver member, committed to promoting the Rust
ecosystem, and sponsoring the GCC Rust implementation. The GCC Rust front
ends are expected to be merged in GCC 13
by December 2022.
- Embecosm, a provider of open-source
software toolchain and embedded operating system services, and a sponsor
of the GCC Rust front end.
- Grafbase, a
platform for building and deploying GraphQL backends.
- Rust for Linux, which was merged with the Linux
6.1 kernel release, laying the foundation for future kernel
drivers and code written in the Rust language. It is expected that the
first major users of Rust in the Linux kernel will be the DRM drivers for
Apple M1/M2 graphics.
Security
Monitoring
This
area currently includes the following companies among the Rust Foundation
Silver members.
- Spectralops is a company that monitors,
classifies, and protects code, assets, and infrastructure from exposed API
keys, tokens, credentials, and high-risk security misconfigurations. They
are a Rust Foundation Silver member.
- Sentry is an application monitoring
platform and is also a Rust Foundation Silver member.
Software
Consulting
These
consulting firms specialize in providing professional services and support for
organizations using the Rust programming language, including software
development, training, and consulting services. They have a deep understanding
of Rust and its ecosystem and can help organizations leverage the language to
build robust and efficient software solutions.
Games
with Rendering Engines
Rust is
still being developed for the gaming industry. Activision Blizzard, a game
company, joined the Rust Foundation as a general sponsor and released a
research report, “Programming Language for
Game Tools” in 2021 by Treyarch, a studio within the company. Since
2018, Treyarch has been gradually incorporating Rust into their tools and
pipeline.
Another noteworthy game company is Embark, which sponsors the Rust game engines Bevy and Fyrox and has open-sourced rust-gpu, which
aims to make Rust the leading language and ecosystem for GPU shaders.
E-commerce
Rust is
being increasingly used in the e-commerce industry. The open-source project Tremor, which is owned by the US furniture
e-commerce company Wayfair, has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF). Tremor processes a massive 10 terabytes of data per day and
10 billion messages per minute, making it a cost-effective
solution for Wayfair .
Another company, CarGurus, a
UK-based used car e-commerce site, has also joined the Rust Foundation as a
General Sponsor member.
Web3
and Blockchain
Rust has
become a widely used language in the Web3 and blockchain space, with many
companies and projects adopting it. Some notable examples include Diem, which was once Facebook’s stablecoin
project and is now owned by Silvergate Capital Corporation, and new public
chains aptoslabs and sui, which both
use the Rust-implemented Move language as their smart contract language. Other
Rust Foundation Silver members in this space include parastate, a multi-chain smart contract platform in the
Polka Ecosystem, Zama, building homomorphic cryptography
solutions for data science and AI, Keyrock,
deploying market-making technology for digital assets, matter-labs,
extending Ether Zero Knowledge Proof, and TECHFUND, a
Japanese blockchain technology incubator.
Summary
Rust is
a versatile programming language that has a diverse range of applications
across various domains. This article highlights some of the successful
applications of Rust in different fields, but it is not exhaustive and there
are many more organizations using Rust in ways that are not visible.
Additionally, the adoption of Rust in China is slower, but there are companies
in China that are gradually adopting it.
It is worth noting that there is a global list of Rust-using companies maintained
by others on GitHub, which provides a more comprehensive view of Rust’s reach.
Rust is like a gentle rain that permeates quietly
and steadily.
Thank you for reading this article.
