Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

By David Ramel
02/19/2025

For years Microsoft has been discussing moving to the Rust programming language for its dev teams in certain scenarios, primarily for the memory-safe aspects of the language as compared to C and C++, the latter used for much low-level systems development at the company.

When we're talking years, consider that in 2019 Microsoft penned "Why Rust for safe systems programming," and in 2021 the company joined the Rust Foundation. The next year Redmond announced a new Rust in Visual Studio Code topic and support with the rust-analyzer extension (see "Visual Studio Code Nods to Rapidly Rising Rust Language"). The next year we reported "Native Rust in Visual Studio Is Top Dev Request, but Progress Slow."

Well, the progress has picked up a bit with the Feb. 19 announcement of the Azure SDK for Rust Beta.

"We decided to create an official Azure SDK for Rust due to the growing interest in the Rust programming language, both externally and within Microsoft," said dev team product manager Ronnie Geraghty. "Rust is known for its performance, reliability, and memory safety, making it an excellent choice for systems programming and applications that require high performance and low-level control."

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Why Rust? *(source: rust-lang.org).*

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code," Geraghty continued. "Additionally, Rust's modern syntax and tooling make it a pleasure to work with, attracting a vibrant and enthusiastic developer community."

Microsoft plans to continue enhancing the Azure SDK for Rust by expanding its support for additional Azure services and refining the existing libraries. The goal is to stabilize these libraries, ensuring they offer a reliable and seamless experience for Rust developers.

To improve usability while maintaining flexibility, the team intends to implement a few key updates. One planned change involves buffering entire responses within the pipeline, ensuring that all policies -- such as automatic retries for certain failures -- are consistently applied. Additionally, arrays will generally be deserialized as empty Vec<T> collections to simplify coding and streamline development.

The project can be explored at its GitHub repo, which contains more detailed documentation, code samples, and installation instructions to augment today's announcement guidance.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.