A brief history of Rust, a programming language that emerged from a side project and has been instrumental in driving the shift toward memory safe programming
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust. — Many software projects emerge because … Tweets: @billatnapier , @richgel999 , and @denelledixon Tweets: @billatnapier : Rust teaches you to handle memory in the correct way ... and not rely on garbage collectors ... https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Richard Geldreich / @richgel999 : This is so true, especially on large scale C/C++ projects: '"In C or C++ you always have this fear that your code will just randomly explode," says Mara Bos, cofounder of the drone firm Fusion Engineering and head of Rust's library team.' https://twitter.com/... Denelle Dixon / @denelledixon : Great read about the history and lovability of Rust by @techreview. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The MIT Technology Review retrospective lands at a moment when Rust's origin story — a side project that matured into a robust ecosystem over a dozen years — has become an industry case study. The governance groundwork matters here: after Mozilla could no longer carry it alone, the language moved to independent stewardship under the Rust Foundation, which opened the door to backing from Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and later Facebook.
What turned that institutional support into momentum is evidence: Google reports the share of memory-safe vulnerabilities in Android fell from 76% in 2019 to 24% by 2024 as new code adopted Rust, with reported memory-safety flaws projected to drop from 220+ to around 36 over the same span. A 2017 Stack Overflow survey already showed Rust topping developer sentiment, and the article's voices — Mara Bos of Fusion Engineering and Richard Geldreich — frame the practical trade: Rust enforces correct memory handling without relying on garbage collectors.
First-order effects
- Teams writing critical systems in C and C++ now have a production-proven alternative with documented security results, shifting new-project language choices toward Rust at Google-scale organizations.
Second-order effects
- C and C++ toolchains face pressure to respond to the memory-safety argument — through better sanitizers, safer subsets, or tooling improvements — while demand grows for developers trained in Rust's ownership model.
Third-order effects
- If Google's vulnerability trajectory holds elsewhere, memory-safe languages become the default expectation for critical systems software, moving 'unsafe by construction' codebases from accepted risk to audit liability.
The trend: Systems programming is steadily shifting from manually managed C/C++ to compiler-enforced memory safety, with Rust's adoption curve and Google's vulnerability data marking the turning point.