Why Tech Giants Are Betting Big on Rust in 2025

Walk into any major tech company’s engineering floor today, and you’ll hear the same conversation.

“We’re rewriting this in Rust.” It’s happening at Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But why? The Problem Nobody Talks About Here’s something most developers don’t realize: around 70% of security bugs in Chrome and Windows come from memory issues. Buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, all that stuff. And these aren’t just annoying bugs. They’re the exact vulnerabilities hackers exploit. C and C++ give you speed, but they also give you rope to hang yourself. You can accidentally read memory you shouldn’t, write to places you don’t own, and create security holes without even knowing it.

What Makes Rust Different Rust catches these problems before your code runs. Not with a garbage collector that slows things down. Not with runtime checks. The compiler itself stops you. Here’s a real example. This code won’t even compile in Rust: fn main() {

   let mut scores = vec![10, 20, 30];
   let first = &scores[0];
   
   scores.push(40);
   
   println!("First score: {}", first);

} Why? Because scores.push(40) might move the entire vector to a new location in memory. That means first could be pointing to garbage. Rust sees this and refuses to compile. In C++, this same pattern compiles fine. It just crashes later when someone actually uses it. Where It’s Actually Being Used Microsoft is rewriting parts of Windows in Rust. Not experimental stuff. Core Windows components. They publicly said that Rust could have prevented 70% of their security patches over the last decade. Amazon built Firecracker in Rust. It’s what powers AWS Lambda and Fargate. Millions of serverless functions run on it every day. They chose Rust because when you’re running code from random customers, you need absolute memory safety. Discord rewrote their message routing in Rust. They had issues with latency spikes in their Go service. The Rust version handles the same load with way less memory and zero spikes. Google is using Rust in Android. Parts of the OS, not just apps. The same people who built Chrome are now writing Rust code for the operating system. The Real Trade-off Learning Rust is hard. You’ll fight with the compiler for weeks. Things that take 10 minutes in Python might take an hour in Rust when you’re starting. But here’s what companies figured out: that pain happens once, during development. The alternative is pain in production, where bugs cost real money and hurt real users. fn process_data(data: &mut Vec<i32>) {

   for item in data.iter_mut() {
       *item *= 2;
   }

}

fn main() {

   let mut numbers = vec![1, 2, 3];
   process_data(&mut numbers);
   println!("{:?}", numbers);

} This code is safe. The compiler verified that process_data can't keep a reference after it returns. It can't accidentally share that reference with another thread. These guarantees don't slow down your program. They just make it correct.

The Architecture Shift When you build systems in Rust, you think differently about data flow: Traditional System (C++): ┌─────────────┐ │ Service │──→ Raw Pointers │ │──→ Manual Memory Management │ │──→ Hope Nothing Breaks └─────────────┘

Rust System: ┌─────────────┐ │ Service │──→ Ownership Rules │ │──→ Compiler Guarantees │ │──→ Safe Concurrency └─────────────┘ Why Now? Cloud costs are huge. Memory bugs are expensive. Security is critical. Rust solves all three at once. When AWS saves 10% on compute costs because Rust uses less memory, that’s millions of dollars. When Microsoft prevents security bugs before shipping, that’s fewer emergency patches and better customer trust.

Should You Care? If you’re building anything that needs to be fast and safe, yes. That’s operating systems, databases, game engines, network services, anything close to hardware. If you’re building a typical web app or doing data science, maybe not yet. Python and JavaScript are still fine for lots of work. But the trend is clear. The lowest levels of our software stack are moving to Rust. The Linux kernel now supports Rust. The Windows kernel is getting Rust. Browsers are adding Rust components. Five years from now, Rust won’t be the new thing. It’ll just be how we build infrastructure. The tech giants aren’t betting on Rust because it’s trendy. They’re betting on it because the math works out. Fewer bugs, better performance, lower costs. That’s not hype. That’s just engineering.

Read the full article here: https://codingplainenglish.medium.com/why-tech-giants-are-betting-big-on-rust-in-2025-cb0e76a7e418