Rust in 2025: Targeting foundational software

Summary

Rust turns 10 this year. It’s a good time to take a look at where we are and where I think we need to be going. This post is the first in a series I’m calling “Rust in 2025”. This first post describes my general vision for how Rust fits into the computing landscape. The remaining posts will outline major focus areas that I think are needed to make this vision come to pass. Oh, and fair warning, I’m expecting some controversy along the way—at least I hope so, since otherwise I’m just repeating things everyone knows.My vision for Rust: foundational softwareI see Rust’s mission as making it dramatically more accessible to author and maintain foundational software. By foundational I mean the software that underlies everything else. You can already see this in the areas where Rust is highly successful: CLI and development tools that everybody uses to do their work and which are often embedded into other tools; cloud platforms that people use to run their applications; embedded devices that are in the things around (and above) us; and, increasingly, the kernels that run everything else (both Windows and Linux!).Foundational software needs performance, reliability—and productivityThe needs of foundational software have a lot in common with all software, but everything is extra important. Reliability is paramount, because when the foundations fail, everything on top fails also. Performance overhead is to be avoided because it becomes a floor on the performance achievable by the layers above you.Traditionally, achieving the extra-strong requirements of foundational software has meant that you can’t do it with “normal” code. You had two choices. You could use C or C++, which give great power but demand perfection in response. Or, you could use a higher-level language like Java or Go, but in a very particular way designed to keep performance high. You have to avoid abstractions and conveniences and minimizing allocations so as not to trigger the garbage collector.Rust changed ...