In the kernel, for real
What was an experimental proposal in 2020 has become reality. Rust is officially in the Linux kernel since version 6.1, released in December 2022. The first Rust modules coexist with millions of lines of C code, with an abstraction layer that allows drivers written in Rust to interact with kernel APIs. Support is not complete — many subsystems do not yet have Rust bindings — but the direction is set. Google uses Rust for new Android drivers, and Microsoft employs the language in Windows components.
Entering the kernel represents the ultimate validation: if the most conservative software project in the world accepts a new language, the message to the industry is clear.
Tokio, Axum and the web backend
Rust’s async ecosystem has stabilised around Tokio, the asynchronous runtime that handles non-blocking I/O, timers and task scheduling. On top of Tokio, frameworks like Axum offer ergonomic APIs for building HTTP services with strong typing, automatic parameter extraction and composable middleware. The model differs from Express or Flask: type errors are caught at compile time, and the ownership system prevents data races in concurrent handlers.
Cloudflare uses Rust for its edge workers. Discord rewrote critical backend components from Go to Rust to reduce garbage-collector-related latency. Figma uses Rust for its collaborative rendering server. These are no longer experiments: they are production systems serving millions of users.
WebAssembly and the browser
WebAssembly (WASM) has opened an unexpected territory for Rust: the browser. Compiling Rust to WASM produces compact, fast modules suited for image processing, cryptography, parsing and computationally intensive client-side logic. Tools like wasm-pack and wasm-bindgen simplify interoperability with JavaScript, allowing Rust functions to be exposed as importable modules in web applications.
Outside the browser, the WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) model extends WASM to the server, with runtimes like Wasmtime and Wasmer executing WASM modules in secure sandboxes.
The ecosystem in numbers
The crates.io registry surpasses 140,000 published crates. CLI tools like ripgrep, fd, bat and exa have demonstrated that Rust produces fast, reliable executables for everyday use. The SWC and Turbopack compilers use Rust to accelerate the JavaScript and TypeScript build chain, replacing tools written in JavaScript with alternatives that are orders of magnitude faster.
From a niche language for systems programmers, Rust has become a general-purpose language with a mature ecosystem covering operating systems, backends, tooling and the browser.
Link: rust-lang.org