Rust's major influences include C++, OCaml, Haskell, and Erlang. The designers refined the language while writing the Servo experimental browser engine and the Rust compiler. Rust has been called a systems programming language, and in addition to high-level features such as functional programming it also offers mechanisms for low-level memory management.įirst appearing in 2010, Rust was designed by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla Research, with contributions from Dave Herman, Brendan Eich, and others. Rust achieves memory safety without garbage collection, and reference counting is optional. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references. Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Illumos, Haiku, Android, Redox, iOS, Fuchsia NET platform.Affine, inferred, nominal, static, strongĪMD64, i686, arm, AArch64, armv7, mips, mips64, mipsel, mips64el, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, risc-v, s390x, WebAssembly

Many of the problems that plagued Microsoft’s abortive Longhorn project were caused by trying to build an entire OS on the. It’s clear that the memory-safe approaches used by higher-level languages don’t work at a system level. Processor cycles matter when you’re working at a systems level, and as Thomas points out in his blog post, unprotected languages like C++ and C are really the only tools that historically work at that level. But a system level, the code used to build operating systems and device drivers, there’s a big difference. There’s no perceptual difference between a C++-develoepd user experience and one built in C#. That’s not a problem for customer-facing code. But those approaches have their trade-offs: The code they produce is slower and works at a higher level than C++. You’ve got lots of tools to help write secure code, from Microsoft’s own Secure Development Lifecycle, to using newer memory-safe languages like C#. Memory safety has been a significant issue for a long time, but the statistical work done by MSRC shows the issue is not going away. As Gavin Thomas, the principal security engineering manager at MSRC, noted that one of the main causes of the bugs in Microsoft code reported to the MSRC is memory corruption, bugs that let memory be overwritten or access what should be protected memory. Could Microsoft switch from its use of C, C++, and C# to other languages? A recent blog post from the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) suggested that it might well be looking at alternatives, with the aim of reducing the risks to its code.

Rust for windows programming