Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges - Mark Russinovich
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited for concrete claims about Microsoft's Rust adoption, such as speedups from rewrites and internal C to Rust translation efforts.
What it is
Mark Russinovich's closing keynote at Rust Nation UK on Microsoft's adoption of Rust, covering security gains, integration challenges, performance results and lessons learned.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Cites tdiff · 2025-03 · on “Zlib-rs is faster than C”
Nevertheless Russinovich actually says something in the lines of "simple rewriting in rust made some our code 5-15% faster (without deliberate optimizations)": [this video]
Cites pjmlp · 2025-03 · on “Taming the UB Monsters in C++”
It is, while at the same time they have changed their point of view on allowing C++ for new projects at Microsoft. I also think Herb Sutter leaving his role at Microsoft might have been related with this. From "Microsoft Azure security evolution: Embrace secure multitenancy, Confidential Compute, and Rust" [LINK] "Decades of vulnerabilities have proven how difficult it is to prevent memory-corrupting bugs when using C/C++. While garbage-collected languages like C# or Java have proven more resilient to these issues, there are scenarios where they cannot be used. For such cases, we’re betting on Rust as the alternative to C/C++. Rust is a modern language designed to compete with the performanc
Cites g-mork · 2025-04 · on “Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms”
Mark Russinovich recently gave a talk at a UK Rust conference that mentioned Microsoft's internal attempts at large scale C->Rust translation, [this video]
Cites pjmlp · 2025-12 · on “Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust”
Well, it is kind of in line with company official communication anyway, so this goal is currently a business target, > Decades of vulnerabilities have proven how difficult it is to prevent memory-corrupting bugs when using C/C++. While garbage-collected languages like C# or Java have proven more resilient to these issues, there are scenarios where they cannot be used. For such cases, we’re betting on Rust as the alternative to C/C++. Rust is a modern language designed to compete with the performance C/C++, but with memory safety and thread safety guarantees built into the language. While we are not able to rewrite everything in Rust overnight, we’ve already adopted Rust in some of the most c
Cites pjmlp · 2026-01 · on “Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp”
If you watch "Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges" it appears the whole effort is more on the Azure side, and besides some timid adoption like GDI regions, there is a lukewarm adoption of Rust on Windows side, still pretty much a C and C++ feud. [this video]
Cites pjmlp · 2026-02 · on “Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed”
You could have checked his conference talk as well, instead of downplaying the interview. "Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges - Mark Russinovich" [this video] The only Microsoft divisions that are still all are into C++ is Windows and XBox, and still, C++/WinRT is now in maintenace, the team has moved into windows-rs, WDK now has Rust bindings available.