Rust in the Wild: What 32 Popular Repos Actually Tell Us About the Memory-Safety Migration
The 2024-2026 memory-safety policy wave - CISA/ONCD "Back to the Building Blocks", Google's Rust-in-the-kernel program, Microsoft's Rust adoption - keeps telling us that migrating unsafe C/C++ to memory-safe languages is a priority. But a priority for whom , and how far has it actually gone? Anecdotes abound (Firefox's style engine, ripgrep, sudo-rs), but there was no code-level ground truth for…
The 2024-2026 memory-safety policy wave highlights the priority of migrating unsafe C/C++ to memory-safe languages, but there is no clear picture of the aggregate state of this migration. A new census quantifies the state of 16 era-paired C/Rust project pairs, consisting of 32 repositories across four tiers. The census measures source components as RUST, C, CPP, or MIXED, based on pinned repo trees.
Results show 99.6% of components are single-language, with mixed-language components being almost nonexistent (0.4%). Almost all Rust-side projects are whole reimplementations, with only 1 in 16 (6.25%) being an FFI binding. The migration is incremental and confined to safety-critical internals, such as git's object store and BoringSSL's crypto.
The census provides an honest answer to the binding-vs-rewrite debate, showing that 93.75% of Rust adoption is whole reimplementation.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
