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Why Is Everything Written in Rust Now?
I was at my desk at work, waiting on a script, when I noticed my toolchain had changed languages underneath me. The script was running through pixi, which is written in Rust. The environment it ran in came from uv, also Rust. I reached for ripgrep to find a function in a codebase I barely knew, and it returned before I finished leaning back in my chair.
And it isn’t only my desk. Solid 2 ships a compiler toolchain written in Rust on top of Oxc, benchmarked somewhere between 20x and 350x faster than the JavaScript compiler it replaces. Bun spent eleven days rewriting half a million lines of itself into Rust. The Linux kernel formally accepted Rust support. Vite is swapping the bundler underneath your build from JavaScript to Rust. And Debian is putting a hard Rust dependency inside APT, the package manager sitting under a good fraction of the servers you have ever logged into, with the four architectures that lack a working Rust toolchain given six months to catch up or be sunset. At this point, I might as well write this article in Rust. 🤣
At no point did I decide any of this. One tool replaced another, a library swapped out under a familiar command, and the defaults of my working day switched languages without asking me first.
Which is worth sitting with for a second, because this is not a fad cycle. I started pulling on the…
