Why Rust is a secret weapon

Google has faced critical security issues within its Bluetooth drivers in Android for many years. Despite valiant effort, they were unable to eliminate these vulnerabilities from within C++. This essentially forced them to consider alternative languages. They’ve recently announced that they’ve been able to use 1.5 million lines of Rust code into Android, without detecting any security vulnerabilities. This compares to 1 vulnerability to 1k lines of C++ code using similar analysis.

Rust is a good fit whenever your business is concerned about cost.

Rust code is cheap to run. Rust-based applications use less RAM and RAM is expensive. Tilde’s story from migrating from Ruby on Rails is illustrative. Their server agent went down from needing 5GB of RAM at rest to 50MB.

Web services, whether they’re deployed in a traditional manner or use the serverless model, are an ideal fit for Rust. There is no garbage collector which can affect tail latencies or create load spikes.

Why it's hard to find jobs?

• It’s hard to hire Rust developers because it’s hard to evaluate them.
• Many people have been scared off by stories of Rust’s steep leaning curve

The writer has created a consulting enterprise for it: https://accelerant.dev/