Yesterday, AWS announced that it is sponsoring the popular Rust programming language. Rust has seen a lot of developments in AWS as it is used for various performance-sensitive components in its popular services such as Lambda, EC2, and S3. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla also use Rust for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code.
Alex Crichton, Rust Core Team Member says, “We’re thrilled that AWS, which the Rust project has used for years, is helping to sponsor Rust’s infrastructure. This sponsorship enables Rust to sustainably host infrastructure on AWS to ship compiler artifacts, provide crates.io crate downloads, and house automation required to glue all our processes together. These services span a myriad of AWS offerings from CloudFront to EC2 to S3. Diversifying the sponsorship of the Rust project is also critical to its long-term success, and we’re excited that AWS is directly aiding this goal.”
Why AWS chose Rust
Rust project maintainers say the reason AWS chose Rust is due to its blazingly fast and memory-efficient performance; its rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety; its great documentation, its friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling; and many other amazing features.
Rust has also been voted as the “Most Loved Language” in Stack Overflow’s survey for the past four years.
Rust also has an inclusive community along with top-notch libraries such as:
- Serde, for serializing and deserializing data.
- Rayon, for writing parallel & data race-free code.
- Tokio/async-std, for writing non-blocking, low-latency network services.
- tracing, for instrumenting Rust programs to collect structured, event-based diagnostic information.
Rust too uses AWS services
Rust project uses AWS services to:
- Store release artifacts such as compilers, libraries, tools, and source code on S3.
- Run ecosystem-wide regression tests with Crater on EC2.
- Operate docs.rs, a website that hosts documentation for all packages published to the central crates.io package registry.
The AWS community is excited to include Rust in their community. It would be interesting to see the combination of Rust and AWS in their future implementations.
Few users are confused about the nature of this sponsorship. A Redditor commented, “It’s not clear exactly what this means – is it about how AWS provides S3/EC2 services for free to the Rust project already (which IIRC has been ongoing for some time), or is it an announcement of something new ($$$ or developer time being contributed?)?”
To know about this announcement in detail, read AWS’ official blog post.
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