Microsoft is making a major commitment to Rust by integrating it directly into the Windows kernel. This strategic move aims to leverage Rust's memory safety to eliminate entire classes of security vulnerabilities in one of the world's most critical codebases.
The company is going a step further by building frameworks for driver development and even AI tools to translate C++ codebases. With Microsoft paving the way, is this the moment Rust becomes the default choice for building new, secure operating system components?
In today’s Rust recap:
> Microsoft integrates Rust into the Windows kernel
> Rust compiler gets its first speed report card
> A 10x faster pre-commit tool built in Rust
> When sorting can beat hashing for performance
Microsoft Bets Big on Rust for Windows Core
The Recap: Microsoft is integrating Rust deep into the Windows kernel and Azure services, betting on the language to eliminate entire classes of security bugs. The initiative, detailed at RustConf 2025, signals a major shift in how the company builds its most critical software.
Unpacked:
Rust's memory safety is already proving its worth in the kernel, where a bug that would have been an exploitable vulnerability in C++ instead caused a safe system crash.
The company is now empowering hardware partners to build safer drivers with a new framework that connects Rust's Cargo ecosystem directly to the Windows Driver Kit.
To accelerate the transition, Microsoft is developing AI tools using its GraphRAG technology to automatically translate C++ codebases into safe, idiomatic Rust.
Bottom line: Microsoft's commitment moves Rust from a promising alternative to a validated choice for large-scale, security-critical systems. By open-sourcing tools for drivers and translation, the company is paving the way for wider industry adoption beyond its own walls.
Rust Compiler Gets Speed Report Card
The Recap: The Rust team just dropped the results from its first compiler performance survey, offering a clear look at developer pain points and a roadmap for boosting build times.
Unpacked:
Waiting for incremental rebuilds after small code changes is the number one complaint, with 55% of developers reporting waits of more than ten seconds.
While
cargo checkis the most-used command for quick feedback, its performance is a key friction point, especially since it doesn't share a build cache withcargo build.The stakes are high: long compile times were cited as a reason for abandoning the language by 45% of former Rust developers who responded.
Bottom line: This survey provides the compiler team with a data-driven roadmap to tackle the most significant performance bottlenecks. These focused efforts aim to directly improve developer productivity and day-to-day workflows.
Pre-commit Goes Turbo with Rust
The Recap: A new Rust-based tool called prek is a drop-in replacement for the popular pre-commit framework, delivering a major performance boost and a dependency-free experience for managing git hooks.
Unpacked:
The tool is approximately 10x faster for hook installation compared to its Python predecessor and uses significantly less disk space.
It ships as a single binary, which means you don't need Python or any other runtime installed to use it, simplifying setup across different environments.
The project maintains full compatibility with existing
.pre-commit-config.yamlfiles and is already being adopted by projects like Airflow and has been recommended by Hugo van Kemenade, a CPython core developer.
Bottom line: This project showcases Rust's ability to significantly enhance core developer tools by improving performance and eliminating dependency headaches. It provides a practical path for teams to speed up their workflows without overhauling existing configurations.
When Sorting Beats Hashing
The Recap: A new deep-dive analysis challenges conventional wisdom, showing a well-tuned "hashed sorting" method can outperform hash tables for counting unique values in large datasets. This approach leverages memory bandwidth more efficiently, flipping the script on typical big-O expectations.
Unpacked:
The performance win comes from memory bandwidth efficiency, where radix sort's sequential passes use cache lines more effectively than a hash table's random memory access.
To ensure consistent speed, keys are transformed using a fast hash to create a uniform distribution, and the full implementation is available for review.
This technique is best for batch operations where keys are accessed infrequently, as hash tables still win when the same keys are looked up repeatedly.
Bottom line: This highlights how theoretical complexity doesn't always map to real-world speed on modern hardware. For developers working on high-performance systems, it's a powerful reminder to benchmark assumptions for CPU-intensive workloads.
The Shortlist
Rust Foundation launched the Rust Innovation Lab, a new initiative to provide governance and administrative support for key ecosystem projects, with the Rustls TLS library as its inaugural member.
Rustc switched to the LLD linker by default on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu in the 1.90.0 release, promising significantly faster link times for many projects.
Rust added a #[derive(From)] macro on nightly, simplifying boilerplate for newtype patterns by automatically generating From trait implementations for structs with a single field.