Why Rust Is Shaping the Future of Safe System Programming

Rust is an open‑source system programming language developed by Mozilla, designed from the start for speed, memory safety, and concurrency.

The New Stack interviewed Rust founder Graydon Hoare, covering the language’s history, adoption, and his views on system programming safety.

In July 2010, Hoare first demonstrated Rust at Mozilla’s annual summit. Since then, Rust’s robust memory and thread‑safety guarantees, active community, and fast‑evolving toolchain have led many major projects to be rewritten in Rust.

Notably, the Servo engine—an HTML rendering engine—was built with Rust and later replaced Firefox’s rendering engine. Under Project Quantum, Mozilla rewrote many critical Firefox components in Rust. Fastly chose Rust for its native WebAssembly compiler and runtime Lucet, and Facebook used Rust for its controversial Libra blockchain.

Hoare began working on Rust as a side project in 2006 while at Mozilla, receiving strong support and a dedicated engineering team. After a burnout in 2013, he left Mozilla for the Stellar payment network and later was recruited by Apple to work on Swift.

Today, Rust is driven by a core team and an active developer community, with developers using it for operating systems, virtual‑reality engines, and various software applications. It has been the "most loved" programming language in the Stack Overflow developer survey for seven consecutive years.

Hoare emphasizes that system programming languages are now in a "healthy" state, thanks to increased interaction between academia and industry, though he warns that growing complexity can worsen security challenges.

He notes that many complex systems remain insecure, citing a recent zero‑day vulnerability in Firefox that was exploited in the wild, and stresses that software legacy issues can take generations to resolve.

State of System Programming and Security

Hoare believes that while efforts to improve safety are ongoing, overall security has not significantly improved, and the increasing complexity of new systems may exacerbate the problem.

How Rust Makes System Programming Safer

Rust’s rich type system and ownership model enforce memory and thread safety by design. Hoare suggests further improvements such as information‑flow control, effect systems, refined types, flow types, transaction systems, consistency systems, session types, unit checking, verified compilers and linkers, and dependent types.

He observes that academia has proposed many security features, but the main challenge is implementing them in a balanced language that a niche market can adopt and that industry developers will accept.

Author: Luo Yi