Beyond WebAssembly: Where Rust is Quietly Dominating (and You Haven’t Noticed)

When you hear “Rust,” your mind might immediately jump to WebAssembly (Wasm). And for good reason! Rust’s unparalleled performance, memory safety, and small binary sizes make it an ideal choice for compiling to Wasm, enabling high-performance code to run in browsers and beyond. It’s a fantastic pairing that has rightly garnered massive attention in the web development community.

But to only see Rust through the lens of WebAssembly is to miss a much larger, more fascinating story. While the spotlight often shines on its web-adjacent capabilities, Rust has been quietly, yet powerfully, making inroads into a diverse array of domains — areas where its unique strengths are proving not just beneficial, but often transformative. Let’s pull back the curtain and explore the “hidden gems” where Rust is truly shining, often without you even realizing it.

1. Embedded Systems & IoT: Safety at the Edge

The world of embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) is notoriously challenging. Memory safety issues, concurrency bugs, and resource constraints are common pitfalls that have plagued developers for decades. This is precisely where Rust steps in as a game-changer. Its strict compile-time checks eliminate entire classes of bugs (like null pointer dereferences and data races) that plague C/C++ development, without sacrificing low-level control or performance. Imagine building firmware for a medical device or a critical industrial sensor — the cost of a bug can be catastrophic. Rust’s guarantees provide a level of confidence that’s hard to achieve with other languages in this space.

Real-World Examples:

Ferrous Systems: A company heavily invested in bringing Rust to embedded, working on safety-critical applications across industries from automotive to aerospace. micro-ros: An experimental integration of ROS 2 (Robot Operating System) with microcontrollers, leveraging Rust for safer, more reliable robotics applications. Embedded Rust Ecosystem: Numerous open-source projects building drivers, real-time operating systems (RTOS), and embedded applications, often targeting ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. “Rust has fundamentally changed how we approach embedded development. The compile-time safety guarantees mean we catch bugs before they ever reach hardware.” — Senior Embedded Engineer at Fortune 500 IoT Company

2. Game Development: A New Era of Performance and Safety

Game development is a realm where performance is paramount, but development speed and bug reduction are equally critical. Traditionally dominated by C++, Rust offers an intriguing alternative, providing C-like performance with modern language features and, crucially, memory safety. This means fewer crashes, fewer obscure bugs, and more predictable behavior — which is a huge win for complex game engines and tools. While it’s still early days for Rust to fully displace C++ in AAA studios, its adoption is growing rapidly in indie games, game engine components, and developer tooling.

Game-Changing Examples:

Bevy Engine: A popular, open-source data-driven game engine written entirely in Rust, known for its modularity and ease of use. It’s gaining traction among indie developers worldwide. Fyrox (formerly rg3d): Another capable 3D game engine written in Rust, demonstrating its ability to handle complex graphics and game logic with impressive performance. Veloren: An open-source multiplayer voxel RPG, inspired by Cube World and Minecraft, built entirely in Rust. It showcases Rust’s capability for handling complex multiplayer networking and real-time gameplay. Developer Tooling: Various tools for asset pipelines, physics simulations, and game networking are increasingly being written in Rust due to its performance and reliability advantages.

3. Command-Line Tools (CLIs): Blazing Fast and Robust

If you’ve ever used a fast, reliable command-line tool recently, there’s a growing chance it was written in Rust. Rust’s efficiency, minimal runtime overhead, and ability to produce single, statically linked executables make it perfect for CLIs. Developers love Rust CLIs because they start instantly, consume minimal resources, and are incredibly stable. Many popular coreutils replacements and new developer tools are now being built in Rust, often outperforming their C/C++/Go counterparts by significant margins.

Must-Have Rust CLI Tools:

ripgrep: A faster, more user-friendly alternative to grep, widely praised for its speed and intuitive output formatting. fd: A simple, fast, and user-friendly alternative to find, with sensible defaults and modern features. exa: A modern replacement for ls, with more features, better defaults, and beautiful colored output. bat: A cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration that’s become essential for many developers. zoxide: A smarter cd command that learns your habits and gets you to directories faster.

4. Operating Systems & Kernel Development: Rebuilding the Foundations

This is perhaps the most ambitious and impactful area where Rust is making waves. Operating system kernels are the very foundation of our computing world, and they demand the absolute highest levels of reliability and performance. The memory safety guarantees of Rust are a massive advantage here, as a single memory error in a kernel can lead to a system crash (a “kernel panic”). While rewriting entire operating systems in Rust is a monumental task, several projects are demonstrating its viability and benefits, and even existing OSes like Linux are beginning to integrate Rust components.

Revolutionary Examples:

Redox OS: A Unix-like operating system written entirely in Rust, showcasing Rust’s capability for low-level system programming and microkernel architecture. Google’s Fuchsia OS: While not exclusively Rust, Fuchsia uses Rust for critical components and drivers, leveraging its safety features for next-generation computing. Linux Kernel: Perhaps the most significant adoption, the Linux kernel has officially begun integrating Rust for new drivers and modules, marking a historic shift in one of the world’s most critical software projects.

5. Blockchain & Decentralized Technologies: Security and Performance at Scale

The blockchain space demands extreme performance, cryptographic security, and robust concurrency. Rust’s combination of speed, explicit memory management, and strong type system makes it an ideal fit for building high-performance blockchain nodes, smart contract platforms, and decentralized applications. The immutability and safety features align perfectly with the principles of secure, verifiable distributed systems. Many of the leading next-generation blockchain platforms are either built in Rust or heavily rely on it for their core components.

Blockchain Pioneers:

Polkadot/Substrate: A leading multi-chain framework for building custom blockchains, with its core written in Rust, enabling unprecedented interoperability. Solana: A high-performance blockchain known for its speed and scalability, with its core client and smart contract development environment heavily utilizing Rust. Near Protocol: Another sharded, proof-of-stake blockchain platform that uses Rust for its core runtime and smart contracts, focusing on developer experience. Parity Technologies: A prominent blockchain infrastructure company that builds many of its tools and clients in Rust, contributing significantly to the ecosystem.

Why Rust is So Well-Suited for These Diverse Fields

What ties these seemingly disparate domains together, making Rust the language of choice? It boils down to a few core principles that address fundamental challenges in modern software development:

Memory Safety Without Garbage Collection

Rust offers memory safety guarantees at compile time, eliminating common bugs like null pointer dereferences and data races, without needing a garbage collector. This means predictable performance crucial for low-latency systems.

Zero-Cost Abstractions

You can write high-level, expressive code in Rust, and the compiler will optimize it down to highly efficient machine code, often matching or exceeding the performance of hand-optimized C/C++.

Fearless Concurrency

Rust’s ownership and borrowing system makes writing safe, concurrent code significantly easier, preventing data races and deadlocks at compile time — a game-changer in our multi-core world.

Control and Low-Level Access

Rust provides fine-grained control over hardware and memory, making it suitable for systems programming where direct interaction with the machine is necessary.

Strong Type System

Rust’s rich type system helps catch errors early in the development cycle, leading to more robust and reliable software that’s easier to maintain.

The Quiet Revolution Continues

While WebAssembly remains a powerful application for Rust, it’s merely one facet of a much larger story. From the tiniest embedded devices to the foundational layers of operating systems and the cutting edge of decentralized finance, Rust is proving itself to be an incredibly versatile, reliable, and performant language.

Its growth in these “quiet” domains is a testament to its robust design and the increasing demand for software that is not just fast, but fundamentally safe and reliable. The days of choosing between performance and safety are over — Rust delivers both. If you haven’t looked beyond Wasm, now’s the time to notice the quiet revolution Rust is leading across the entire software spectrum. The question isn’t whether Rust will dominate these fields, but how quickly it will happen.

What’s Next for Rust?

The momentum is undeniable. With major tech companies investing heavily in Rust infrastructure, academic institutions teaching it in computer science programs, and the growing ecosystem of libraries and tools, Rust is positioned to become the systems programming language of the future. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to expand your skills or a newcomer deciding what language to learn, Rust offers a compelling combination of performance, safety, and growing industry adoption that’s hard to ignore.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/rustaceans/beyond-webassembly-where-rust-is-quietly-dominating-and-you-havent-noticed-2638bc3b1056