Microsoft Elevates Rust to Tier-1 Language Status for Internal Development

Rust's New Status at Microsoft

Microsoft has officially elevated Rust to a Tier-1 language for internal development. This designation means Rust now receives the same level of support and integration as established languages like C++, C#, and TypeScript within the company. The move reflects Microsoft's strategic investment in Rust, which has included financial contributions to the Rust Project over several years.

Implications of Tier-1 Status

Achieving Tier-1 status provides internal Microsoft teams using Rust with a streamlined path from development to production. This includes access to secure toolchain builds, productive developer tooling, quality workflows, deep platform integration, and compliance with Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements. The goal is to ensure Rust can be used effectively across various Microsoft projects, from firmware to microservices.

Integration with MSVC and Windows

A key aspect of this integration is ensuring Rust's full participation in the MSVC (Microsoft Visual C++) ecosystem, which has co-evolved with the Windows platform for decades. Microsoft aims for seamless interoperability between Rust and C++ in hybrid projects, ensuring that innovations in MSVC and Windows are available to both languages. This is crucial for areas like firmware, drivers, kernels, hypervisors, and applications.

Introducing rustc_codegen_utc

To facilitate this deep integration, Microsoft introduced rustc_codegen_utc, an alternative code generation backend for rustc. This backend connects rustc's compiler machinery to the MSVC backend, enabling high compatibility with the Windows tooling ecosystem and ABI. It also supports binary hardening, code security features, post-link compliance, and cross-language inlining and optimization.

Enhanced Development Capabilities

The integration through rustc_codegen_utc allows Rust to leverage capabilities and workflows built over many years with the MSVC tech-stack. These include debugging, crash-dump analysis, profiling, diagnostics, and coverage. This investment aims to provide Rust developers at Microsoft with a comprehensive and robust development environment comparable to that of C++.