Amazon Web Services (AWS) explained in a blog post how and why it promotes the Rust programming language. In addition to financial support, the main focus is on actively participating in the further development of the language. Therefore, the company has hired a few people to contribute to projects in the Rust ecosystem.

Specifically, the post mentions that AWS has some developers from the Community from Rust and Tokyo. The latter project is a concurrency-oriented library for Rust which, in addition to AWS, uses Microsoft on Azure, Facebook, Dropbox and Linkerd, among others.

Time for further development In addition, AWS recently recruited Felix Klock, a developer from the official Rust team. The company cites two reasons why it is hiring active developers: on the one hand, it wants to ensure that the Rust commiters have sufficient time and resources for further development, and on the other hand, AWS wants to strengthen Rust expertise for its own projects. The blog post emphasizes the community aspect, and that the developers now paid by Amazon work side by side with developers from companies such as Dropbox or Confluent.

The post also emphasizes that AWS “beneficiaries of the is outstanding work that others have done to move Rust forward “. AWS neither brought Rust into being nor made the language successful today, but wants to contribute to its future success. Shane Miller, Senior Software Engineering Manager at AWS, emphasizes: “It’s not just about hiring a few people around the Tokyo and Rust projects, but Rust is a critical component of Amazon’s long-term strategy”.

Rust: from Mozilla into the world Mozilla Research developed Rust from the start with a focus on security and concurrency. The programming language, which was released in version 1 48 in mid-November, is intended to largely avoid weaknesses caused by memory access errors and buffer overflows. The first stable release appeared 2015, so Rust was able to celebrate his fifth birthday this year.

The release of Rust 1. 31 in December 2018, with which the era of Rust 2018 started. For the evolution of the language, the Rust team deliberately refrained from changing the version to Rust 2.x, as Rust 2018 has brought almost no changes that lead to incompatibilities ( Breaking Changes).

Plans for the Rust Foundation began this summer. The trigger for the plans for the organization was the uncertainty regarding the effects of the wave of layoffs at Mozilla on the programming language, which is now a community project, but in which Mozilla is still heavily involved. The foundation is to start work at the turn of the year.

Funding and commitment by Amazon, Microsoft & Co AWS has shown ambitions in the Rust environment for some time, both in terms of use and funding. In autumn 2019 the company announced the support of the community. AWS also wrote some tools such as Firecracker for developing microVMs in Rust. Even the strongest cloud competitor Microsoft is increasingly relying on Rust. In addition, Rust is often discussed as the programming language for the Linux kernel.

Further details on the plans of AWS can be found on the company’s open source blog.

(rme)