Mark Russinovich: "From Blue Screens to Orange Crabs: Microsoft’s Rusty Revolution" | RustConf 2025
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as evidence of Microsoft's real investment in Rust, including the memory-safety share of CVEs and concrete rewrite results like DirectWriteCore's size and performance.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What it is
Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO and Technical Fellow, gives the Day 1 opening keynote at RustConf 2025 on Microsoft's adoption of Rust across its products. He covers security motivations, integration challenges, lessons learned, and examples like the DirectWriteCore font rewrite.
What people said
Cites pjmlp · 2025-10 · Hacker News · on “Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems”
Not sure about the new backend, but they are indeed quite invested. "From Blue Screens to Orange Crabs: Microsoft's Rusty Revolution" [this video]
Cites DASD · 2026-06 · Hacker News · on “Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter”
Russinovitch (Azure's CTO/CISO) gave a speech at RustConf 2025 and mentions it(DirectWriteCore) took 2 engineers 6 months resulting in 154K LOC and 5-15 percent performance increase for font shaping. [this video]
Cites devy · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft”
This makes strategic sense in multiple ways: 1. Rust's memory safety design will help Microsoft improve a gigantic portfolios of products that have been known to have lots of CVEs and 70% of them are memory safety issues, according to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich's talk at RustCon last year.[1] 2. Windows 11's forceful push to retire millions of legacy PC hardware by putting Windows 10 EOL last October was absurd for millions of consumers and businesses. I was literrally helping a S&B having to replace the entire fleet of working PCs simply because Windows 10 of EOL and Windows 11 refused to run on those legacy hardware. Quite honestly those PCs ran just fine! That's why some has been migrated