In a massive infrastructure shift, Cloudflare has replaced its core NGINX-based proxy with a new system built entirely in Rust. The move signals one of the industry's biggest bets on the language for handling high-stakes internet traffic.
This decision by a major internet player validates Rust's promises of safety and performance. Will other companies now follow Cloudflare's lead and replace their own legacy C/C++ systems?
In today’s Rust recap:
> Cloudflare replaces NGINX with a new Rust-based core proxy
> Firefox achieves a 4x performance boost with a Rust UDP rewrite
> A new Rust linker, Wild, challenges Mold for the top speed
> Proton unifies its mobile apps with a shared Rust core
Cloudflare's Rust Core
The Recap: Cloudflare has announced a monumental upgrade to its core infrastructure, replacing its long-standing NGINX-based proxy with a new system built entirely in Rust. This move marks one of the most significant industry bets on Rust for handling critical, large-scale internet traffic.
Unpacked:
This isn't just a minor update; it's a complete replacement of the core proxy system that was originally based on NGINX, a technology that has powered much of the web for decades.
By choosing Rust, Cloudflare prioritizes memory safety and performance, aiming to eliminate entire classes of security vulnerabilities common in legacy systems.
The new proxy features a modular design, allowing Cloudflare's engineers to develop and deploy new features more quickly and reliably across their global network.
Bottom line: Cloudflare's decision adds significant weight to the growing trend of adopting Rust for mission-critical infrastructure. It serves as a powerful validation for developers considering Rust for high-stakes projects where performance and security are non-negotiable.
Firefox's UDP Overhaul
The Recap: A Mozilla engineer shared a deep-dive on rewriting Firefox’s entire QUIC UDP I/O stack in Rust, replacing the dated, Netscape-era NSPR library with a modern, memory-safe implementation.
Unpacked:
The new stack delivered a 4x performance increase in some CPU-bound benchmarks, jumping from under 1 Gbit/s to 4 Gbit/s.
Rather than building from scratch, the team leveraged the open-source
quinn-udplibrary, accelerating development and integrating seamlessly with Firefox's existing Rust-based QUIC state machine.This modernization also enabled Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) support across all platforms, though it highlighted real-world complexities with OS-specific optimizations that are still being worked through on Windows.
Bottom line: This project serves as a powerful case study for modernizing critical infrastructure with Rust. It proves how the language's safety guarantees and vibrant ecosystem can directly drive major performance wins in software used by millions.
The Wild New Linker
The Recap: A new high-speed linker written in Rust, called Wild, is emerging as a serious contender to the current performance leader, Mold. Its latest release showcases significant speed gains while aiming for the long-term goal of incremental linking.
Unpacked:
In benchmarks linking large C++ and Rust projects, Wild consistently outperforms LLVM's LLD and even surpasses Mold in several key scenarios, cutting down compile times.
The project's ultimate goal is to implement incremental linking—a feature not planned for Mold—to dramatically accelerate iterative development cycles for developers.
Wild already supports Linux on x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V platforms, and with its latest release, the team now considers it stable enough that it uses it to link itself.
Bottom line: Wild represents a significant advancement in build tooling, directly targeting one of the biggest bottlenecks in large-scale software development. Its creation in Rust highlights the language's growing role in building the next generation of reliable, high-performance developer tools.
Proton's Mobile Revamp
The Recap: Proton has rebuilt its mobile apps from the ground up, using a shared Rust core that doubles performance and enables synchronized feature releases across iOS and Android.
Unpacked:
By rewriting its mobile tech stack in Rust, Proton now shares roughly 80% of the code between its native iOS and Android apps.
The new shared core delivers a significant performance boost, making routine actions like scrolling and archiving messages feel instant and twice as fast.
This new architecture sets the stage for faster feature delivery and will also serve as the foundation for the upcoming Proton Calendar apps.
Bottom line: Proton's investment in Rust provides a compelling case study for building high-performance, cross-platform mobile applications with a unified codebase. This move not only enhances the user experience through speed and feature parity but also streamlines future development across their entire product suite.
The Shortlist
crates.io removed two malicious crates, faster_log and async_println, that were found to exfiltrate sensitive data like cryptocurrency private keys from user files at runtime.
Slint released its implementation of the Material 3 design system, providing a world-class UI toolkit for building consistent, touch-friendly applications across desktop, web, and embedded targets.
RisingWave open-sourced Foyer, a hybrid caching library for object stores that unifies memory and disk caching to reduce latency and S3 access costs in data-intensive systems.
QuestDB explored the compiler's journey from a single fetch_max call to the generated assembly, revealing the layers of abstraction from Rust macros to LLVM's AtomicExpandPass that create the underlying CAS loop.