Rust engineering
Given the choice, I write Rust. It’s fast, it’s safe, and it does more with less hardware.
Rust gives you the performance of C or C++ without whole classes of memory and concurrency bugs. Programs start quickly, use little memory, and usually need smaller, cheaper servers, which also means less energy.
Where it pays off
- Performance-critical components: the hot path of a system written in C#, Go, TypeScript or Python, rewritten in Rust and called directly from the existing code.
- Services and APIs that need to be fast and predictable under load.
- Command-line tools and single-binary applications that are easy to distribute and run anywhere.
- Reliability: software that has to keep running, where a crash or a data race is expensive.
Experience
- Microsoft: in a high-security government delivery team, built production services in C# with performance-critical components in Rust and Go. I also built and benchmarked equivalent implementations in Python, Go, Rust and C#, called from C# through FFI, to compare their performance and trade-offs.
- An AI app-building platform: designed and built a local-first migration agent as a Rust workspace of around 18 crates, with a native desktop app built with Tauri, macOS screen capture and Keychain integration, local OCR, a CLI and a local MCP server. Its security guarantees are enforced by automated tests, not just stated as policy.
- Rilbo: our own project tracker is a single Rust executable, with the web UI, API and MCP server built in and the data in SQLite.
Learning Rust
I also run Rust Primer, a hands-on course for programmers who already code and want to read, write and review Rust with confidence, using AI as a tutor rather than an authority. Its articles are free to read, and the course itself is in private alpha.
When Rust isn’t the answer
Rust isn’t always the right tool. If the real bottleneck is the design, the database or the infrastructure rather than the language, rewriting a TypeScript or C# system in Rust won’t fix it, and I’ll tell you so.
I’m just as happy working in Go, TypeScript and C#/.NET. In fact, over the years, I’ve used many other languages, too. That’s what happens when you’ve been coding since the late 1970s. I’ll recommend whatever your team can maintain after the engagement ends.