"Google, Microsoft Take Refuge in Rust Language's Better Security"

When Fortanix launched in 2016, the company decided to commit to the one-year-old Rust's programming language to benefit from its security strengths and performance.  Seven years later, Fortanix's commitment to Rust has proved to be a success.  Eight years after its 1.0 release, the Rust language and development platforms continue to gain popularity among developers and companies focused on secure code.  Currently, Rust has a far lower TIOBE rating than C or C++.  However, the language is seeing significant additional users year over year.  Rust also has a committed following.  According to the Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey, while only 12% of programmers used the technology in the past year, nearly 85% of those developers want to continue using the language, making it the "most admired" programming language.  Mircosoft is now also turning to using Rust as part of an effort to eliminate classes of bugs.  The company has created DWriteCore in Rust to turn font parsing into a memory safety feature and is currently working on experimenting with writing parts of the graphics driver interface (GDI) in Rust.  The company has seen performance increase by 5% to 15% in early versions of the code.  Google is also a major supporter of Rust.  The company attributes a drop in the share of memory-safety vulnerabilities in Android to the transition to Rust, Kotlin (a functional programming language), and Java from C and C++.

Dark Reading reports: "Google, Microsoft Take Refuge in Rust Language's Better Security"