Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
security.googleblog.com
Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
1–10 of 430 posts
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#2This is the bomb that sank C++ in 2026.
Have fun justifying that Rust is "also" unsafe, with the right tools you can achieve the same in C++, if you're a great dev you can do even better, etc.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#3Most of these is confirmation of easily observable reality, but the 4x difference in rollback rates, jesus christ.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#4Most of these is confirmation of easily observable reality, but the 4x difference in rollback rates, jesus christ.
I found it interesting that the rollback rate remained more or less constant despite size differences.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#5Note that Google still doesn't have official support for using Rust in Android userspace, though.
Despite all pluses on the blog, NDK only supports C and C++ tooling, same on Android Studio, and it is up to the community to do the needful work, if anyone feels like using Rust instead.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#6This is the bomb that sank C++ in 2026. Have fun justifying that Rust is "also" unsafe, with the right tools you can achieve the same in C++, if you're a great dev you can do even better, etc.
I personally have zero interest in these feud wars. I'm only glad there are more quality options for Devs to develop safer system tools.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#7At this point I feel like it's no longer an uphill climb to get Rust into foundational, mission-critical code adoption. The benefits are so obvious. Maybe it's just a lingering religious war?
In any case, I'm glad we're seeing more and more evidence and case-studies of why "rewrite it in Rust" isn't just a meme.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#8Most of these is confirmation of easily observable reality, but the 4x difference in rollback rates, jesus christ.
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Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#9This isn't control for confounding factors.
For example: folks are more likely to rewrite stuff that is well-understood, and stuff that is well-understood is going to have shorter review times and lower rollback rate.
That gnarly horrid mess that only a few greybeards grok and has massive test coverage, a long tail of requirements enforced by tests and experience, and a culture of extreme rigor? Longer reviews, more rollbacks, and less likely to be rewritten.
Re: Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
#10> Chromium: Parsers for PNG, JSON, and web fonts have been replaced with memory-safe implementations in Rust, making it easier for Chromium engineers to deal with data from the web
I find this surprising, isn't Wuffs[1] (also made by Google) an even better fit for this particular use-case? (It has compile-time spatial memory safety, where Rust has compile-time temporal safety but runtime spatial safety, with bound checking).
Obviously for general-purpose system programming, Rust is a no-brainer and I'm happy to see Google pursuing their rustification of Android.