Link to the talk -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2611&v=8T6ClX-y2AE (timestamped to the part about Rust)
The speaker covers a bunch of areas and the final part of the talk (around 10 minutes) is about Microsoft introducing Rust in some self-contained areas in Windows.
Some highlights:
- Their focus is on "killing bug classes". More context in this post by Microsoft Research from 2019 - A proactive approach to more secure code.
- They want to do this with memory safe languages, CPU architectural changes and safer language subsets. This talk focussed on memory safe languages, specifically Rust.
- First area they've introduced Rust in - a cross platform rewrite of a font parser called DWriteCore. The team reported that parsing was "incredibly easy". Font shaping performance increased by 5-15% compared to the C++ version.
- It took about 2 devs working for half a year to complete this. The speaker says this is pretty good value for an area that is notorious for security bugs.
- Second area is the REGION data type in Win32k GDI. Currently in consumer Windows, disabled by feature flag. Will be enabled in insider builds soon. Performance has been good, some small wins for the Rust version.
- There is now a Windows SysCall implemented in completed safe Rust.
TLDR - Rust is inside the Windows Kernel, will be enabled widely soon.
The speaker covers a bunch of areas and the final part of the talk (around 10 minutes) is about Microsoft introducing Rust in some self-contained areas in Windows.
Some highlights:
- Their focus is on "killing bug classes". More context in this post by Microsoft Research from 2019 - A proactive approach to more secure code.
- They want to do this with memory safe languages, CPU architectural changes and safer language subsets. This talk focussed on memory safe languages, specifically Rust.
- First area they've introduced Rust in - a cross platform rewrite of a font parser called DWriteCore. The team reported that parsing was "incredibly easy". Font shaping performance increased by 5-15% compared to the C++ version.
- It took about 2 devs working for half a year to complete this. The speaker says this is pretty good value for an area that is notorious for security bugs.
- Second area is the REGION data type in Win32k GDI. Currently in consumer Windows, disabled by feature flag. Will be enabled in insider builds soon. Performance has been good, some small wins for the Rust version.
- There is now a Windows SysCall implemented in completed safe Rust.
TLDR - Rust is inside the Windows Kernel, will be enabled widely soon.