Rust is a relatively young programming language, but has been favored by companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google for a while now. They write their code (partly) in Rust, saying goodbye to C and C++.

Recently, it became clear that Rust is also gaining popularity among other big players. This includes Mark Russinovich, CTO at Microsoft. On Twitter, he called for starting no more new projects in C or C++, because these languages are outdated, and using Rust instead.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, also caught the attention of the tech community. He announced that C will be joined by Rust as a development language in the Linux kernel. And that is remarkable - especially since C++ has never managed to be used in it.

Again, food for conversation - even among us. Can we expect a (r)evolution? We asked Devon Kerkhove, one of our embedded software developers.

Devon: “I completely follow Mark Russinovich when he says that C and C++ have become obsolete programming languages. When I started developing, I wrote my code in C. I soon wondered whether this was really the best thing available to us after all these years of software development. So I started to immerse myself in Rust, and 1 thing is for sure: I wouldn’t want to go back to C.”

solving problems that we’ve caused ourselves.

“Rust has a steep learning curve. Suddenly I had to take into account new concepts, and at first this could be frustrating”, Devon tells us. “Fortunately, there are a lot of best practices that guide developers in their learning process. I am convinced that (young) developers will be more and more inclined to write their code in Rust.”

Devon: “The more I work with it, the more I realize that Rust is, in fact, better. To give an example: when developing in C, I used to lose a huge amount of time integrating other people's code into mine. In fact, that process is so time-consuming that many developers find it easier to rewrite all the code themselves. And that’s just not ideal.”

“In C++, that process was slightly better, but it still took time. In Rust, it only takes me 2 seconds to integrate existing code into mine, because everything is standardized. If my project compiles without error messages, I am 100% sure that the existing code is bug-free. So I am much more productive.”