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The company described the experience of its developers in migrating projects as extremely positive.
At the recent Rust Nation UK conference in London, Lars Bergstrom, Director of Engineering at Google, spoke about the company's positive experience in migrating projects written in Go and C++ to the Rust programming language. Google's experiments showed that developers became twice as productive when they started using Rust instead of C++.
Bergstrom noted that doubts about the productivity and reliability of Rust, which existed a few years ago, are now almost dispelled. The reason for this is increased awareness of memory security issues in non-secure programming languages and recommendations from US and other government agencies to switch to secure languages for mission-critical software.
One of the main advantages of Rust is its ability to minimize errors related to memory security, which makes it the preferred choice for projects where this is critical. Industry giants like Microsoft have already called on developers to switch from C# to Rust to improve code security.
While C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup and other critics point to the possibility of achieving memory security in C++ with additional tools, Google presents counterarguments based on real-world experience of switching to Rust. Rewriting the code from Go to Rust, according to Bergstrom, showed that this not only does not increase the team's time spent on development, but also reduces memory consumption and the number of errors in the long run.
An important aspect noted by Bergstrom is also the reduction in the effort required to maintain and update services written in Rust by more than two times compared to similar projects in C++.
Google also conducted internal surveys among its developers, which showed a high level of confidence in the correctness of Rust code compared to other programming languages. So, 85% of developers expressed confidence that their Rust code functions exactly as intended, which is an extremely high indicator.
These results confirm the tendency to overestimate the choice of a programming language not only in terms of its performance and usability, but also in the context of ensuring code security and reliability. The results achieved by Google can serve as an additional incentive for a broad transition to Rust in the industry.
At the recent Rust Nation UK conference in London, Lars Bergstrom, Director of Engineering at Google, spoke about the company's positive experience in migrating projects written in Go and C++ to the Rust programming language. Google's experiments showed that developers became twice as productive when they started using Rust instead of C++.
Bergstrom noted that doubts about the productivity and reliability of Rust, which existed a few years ago, are now almost dispelled. The reason for this is increased awareness of memory security issues in non-secure programming languages and recommendations from US and other government agencies to switch to secure languages for mission-critical software.
One of the main advantages of Rust is its ability to minimize errors related to memory security, which makes it the preferred choice for projects where this is critical. Industry giants like Microsoft have already called on developers to switch from C# to Rust to improve code security.
While C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup and other critics point to the possibility of achieving memory security in C++ with additional tools, Google presents counterarguments based on real-world experience of switching to Rust. Rewriting the code from Go to Rust, according to Bergstrom, showed that this not only does not increase the team's time spent on development, but also reduces memory consumption and the number of errors in the long run.
An important aspect noted by Bergstrom is also the reduction in the effort required to maintain and update services written in Rust by more than two times compared to similar projects in C++.
Google also conducted internal surveys among its developers, which showed a high level of confidence in the correctness of Rust code compared to other programming languages. So, 85% of developers expressed confidence that their Rust code functions exactly as intended, which is an extremely high indicator.
These results confirm the tendency to overestimate the choice of a programming language not only in terms of its performance and usability, but also in the context of ensuring code security and reliability. The results achieved by Google can serve as an additional incentive for a broad transition to Rust in the industry.
