Microsoft’s $1M Vote of Confidence in Rust’s Future

Microsoft has donated $1 million to The Rust Foundation to do whatever it sees fit.

Microsoft, a Rust Foundation Platinum Member, made an unrestricted donation in December 2023 to help the organization advance the performance, safety, and sustainability of the Rust programming language.

However, the announcement of the donation was delayed because the foundation needed time to democratically decide how to best allocate the funds to support the Rust maintainers and the language itself, Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, the Rust Foundation’s executive director and CEO, told The New Stack.

Two Years

Microsoft’s donation will be invested over a two year period and applied to high-priority areas of need in the Rust ecosystem, including hiring an additional Rust Foundation infrastructure engineer (now closed to applications), funding the Rust Foundation’s capstone “Fellowship” program, and developing new systems and programs to support the work of Rust Project maintainers and reduce workload strain, Rumbul said.

In January 2024, the Rust Foundation’s Board of Directors approved a motion to put $350,000 of this funding towards employing a new Infrastructure Engineer for two years, and to ringfence $650,000 for the Rust Project to directly fund priorities of their choosing over a period of two years.

The Rust Foundation spent the first quarter of 2024 in close collaboration with the Rust Foundation Project Directors and the Rust Project Leadership Council to identify the most pressing areas of need within the Rust Project. The Leadership Council is currently considering a plan that would involve using a large portion of the first $325,000 reserved for the Rust Project to make key process improvements, including the development of new collaboration mechanisms to help support maintainer workflow efficiency.

“By making this unrestricted $1M contribution to the Rust Foundation, Microsoft has demonstrated its ongoing commitment to the Rust programming language, the Rust Foundation’s stewardship, and the Leadership Council’s status as an advocate for the wider Rust Project,” she said in a statement. “The Rust Foundation looks forward to supporting emerging priorities within the Project, in addition to hiring a second Infrastructure Engineer and continuing our direct support of Rust maintainers through the Fellowship program.”

Long-Time Supporter

Microsoft has been a long-time supporter of the Rust programming language and the Rust Foundation, especially through the Azure division and Mark Russinovich, Microsoft’s CTO for Azure, Rumbul noted.

“This contribution demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to the Rust programming language, and its continued success through the Rust Foundation,” said Nell Shamrell-Harrington, Rust Foundation Member Director for Microsoft and Board Vice-Chair, in a statement. “Microsoft is pleased to see its $1M investment being used to hire Rust Foundation infrastructure engineers, support the Rust Foundation Community Grants Program, and directly support critical areas of need identified by leaders within the Rust Project.”

Microsoft’s donation was not only unrestricted but also unexpected, demonstrating the company’s faith in the foundation to allocate the funds effectively, she said.

Google Donation

In February, Google donated $1M to The Rust Foundation to fund efforts to make C++ and Rust more interoperable. However, this Microsoft donation is different.

For one thing, it came to the foundation a couple of months before Google’s donation, and it was for the foundation to choose what to do with the funding.

“This donation is different from Google’s $1 million donation, which was specifically earmarked for studying the interoperability between C++ and Rust,” Rumbul said.

That two major tech vendors are investing in Rust says a lot, according to Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Omdia.

He argues that two companies that have their own vested interests in the likes of C#/TypeScript and Golang, all strongly typed languages are donating to the Rust language is significant.

“I honestly think this sort of investment points to two important thoughts. First it underscores the value of the Rust language, which has found its way into many important projects, such as the Linux kernel itself. Even though the language may be difficult to learn, it has proven Itself to be well suited to software that operates close to the hardware, delivering both performance and stability,” Shimmin told The New Stack. “And second, I think it calls attention to the need for guidance and stability within the Rust community itself, which has proven to be somewhat volatile over the last year or two.”

Safety and Security

Meanwhile, Rumbul said memory safety and secure programming have been key to organizations adopting Rust.

“I feel like two or three years ago and before that, no one was really talking about security like now, as security was always kind of a bolt-on after the fact,” she said. “Whereas now the attitude has shifted, and you should be building secure software by default. You need to be baking in security at the time of coding.”

Rumbul mentioned directives from organizations like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency () and the White House looking at Rust due to its focus on security and performance.

“Cloud providers need memory-effective code — and this one of the Rust fortes,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research. “And Rust is just popular with developers, as it is ‘the most loved language,’” according to Stack Overflow, he said. “It makes sense as a foundation member for Microsoft to be a good citizen.”

Overall, the unrestricted donation from Microsoft is seen as a significant vote of confidence in the Rust Foundation and its ability to effectively support and grow the Rust ecosystem.