2022 is looking to be a great year to be a Rust programmer. Rust is not quite mainstream yet, but with its loyal user base and growing use cases around the tech world, it is easy to see how Rust will continue to grow and flourish in 2022.

I have made a list of many things to look forward to happening in the Rust world. A couple of conferences are listed and some improvements to Rust itself. Also, I cover some major adoption points for the Rust programming language.

First, let’s cover the conferences coming in 2022.

Conferences

The premier conference in North America for Rust is RustConf. This conference is traditionally held in August or September in Portland Oregon. The conference in 2022 was held as a virtual conference, and having been an attendee there it went really well. There were no technical problems or glitches in the service. It all ran smoothly. I have attended in the past and will again this year. Whether it is held virtually again or is in person I guess we will have to wait and see. As I write this the website has not yet been updated for 2022. I would expect an announcement in March or April. I had fun at the conference last year.

At this time no other conferences have been announced.

Microsoft Adoption and Growth

Microsoft has been working with Rust for a couple of years now, as of this writing. They have found that 70% of security patches pushed to computers are to fix memory-related bugs and Microsoft believes that Rust would have been able to catch these bugs during the development phase. Since then, Microsoft has tasked some engineers to rewrite some components of Windows in Rust to get some developer sentiment.

Rust programmers know this of course. Memory management is one of the main reasons that Rust is being adopted more and more. For more on Rust memory management, I would check out this excellent article.

Microsoft has even created a learning channel for those developers who wish to learn more about Rust. You can read about it here. Expect more out of Microsoft using Rust.

Rust in Linux Kernel

Late last year Rust become the second official language for the Linux Kernel. The Linux Kernel was originally written in C. Now Rust can be used for further Kernel development going forward. The aim is to not replace or rewrite the entire Linux Kernel in Rust. New features that are considered for being part of the Linux Kernel can now be written in Rust or C. The main area that Rust programming will be used for new Kernel features will be in drivers. They will affect the main kernel packages the least. Slowly Rust will become more a part of the core package functions and development.

This should be fun for programmers of all types interested in working on the Linux Kernel. It is another tool in the toolbox, so to say, for writing code for Linux. Here is a primer on writing code for Linux. It does not yet cover Rust.

Rust Community Grants Program

On December 9th of 2021 the Rust Foundation announced they would be creating a Rust Community Grants Program. What they intend is, “widespread adoption of the Rust programming language, the Rust developer community is the fastest growing in the last two years. and the work of the engineers maintaining and contributing to the open source Rust Project and its ecosystem remains in high demand. Financial support from the Rust Foundation will focus on impactful and sustainable work that best demonstrates the remarkable capabilities of Rust.” (From the Rust Foundation website)

Crates.io 24/7 Support

So much of Rust runs on Crates. With over ten billion downloads Crates.io is the most used crate system in the Rust programming ecosystem. It is needed and so is 24/7 support. The Rust Foundation has stepped forward to support this need for the Rust community at large. Now programmers around the world who use Rust can expect to find their questions answered.

More about this development here.

Cloud Compute Program

Provides free credits for Rust maintainers. These credits come via Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure project, and Google Cloud. This will further enable Rust maintainers to test their solutions for the Rust community at large.

A Rust maintainer is an individual programmer or organization that has resolved to keep work going on different aspects of the Rust programming language. Having access to these services means that those creating the code that enables Rust to run so well now have the ability to test their code in more or less an environment that would resemble an actual work situation. It is a really good thing.

Thank you for reading.

I also wrote this article on Why I am Learning Rust

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