Loved by programmers and adopted by large companies,
let's see how Rust is winning in performance and safety.
Optimizing cloud file-storage
Since the engine is highly concurrent, writing, testing, and debugging is hard. Dropbox uses Rust for parts of its file synchronization engine, since Rust's static types and heavy compile-time checks give it an advantage over dynamically typed languages like Python when you need to tackle complex codebases and concurrent code.
Primary source control system is partially written in Rust.
Facebook were looking for a compiled language to rewrite its source control backend in and were attracted to Rust because of its safety benefits. Since then, Rust has been adopted by the source control team. As the reasons for adoption, they mention the huge cost of bugs for Facebook and the ease of the compiler feedback loop, in contrast to static analysis and code reviews.
Experimenting with integrating Rust into its large C/C++ codebases.
A main argument is because of the memory safety that Rust provides, Microsoft determined that over half of the security patches pushed to computers are to fix memory-related bugs and believes that Rust would've been able to catch these bugs during the development phase. They tried various options to solve this issue, such as extensive developer training and static analysis tools. However, it seems like the only way out is to make these vulnerabilities impossible to do.
Writing highly performant, safe infrastructure-level networking and other systems software.
The Rust language has quickly become critical to building infrastructure at scale at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and they're adapting models for parallel development to incorporate agility in the language. AWS increasingly builds critical infrastructures like the Firecracker VMM using Rust because its out-of-the-box features reduce the time and effort needed to reach Amazon's high-security bar, while still delivering runtime performance similar to C and C++.
Rewriting their multiplayer syncing engine in Rust
The unpredictable latency spikes during syncing with the old server that was written in TypeScript and, being single-threaded, it couldn't process operations in parallel. That meant a single slow operation would lock up the entire worker until it was complete.
Figma chose Rust for this rewrite because it combines best-in-class speed with low resource usage while still offering the safety of standard server languages. Which in particular, some of the performance issues with the old server were caused by the garbage collector.
