Google has made a donation of $1 million to The Rust Foundation. The contribution has been earmarked to underwrite the Interop Initiative: a new C++/Rust interoperability effort.

Google is a Platinum Member of the foundation. The money from Google follows news of a similar $1 million grant made by Microsoft last November. That news was revealed in a tweet by David Weston, director of OS security for Windows at Microsoft, where he also said that Microsoft is committing $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a first-class language in Microsoft's engineering systems.

The CEO of The Rust Foundation, Dr. Rebecca Rumbul said that despite the growing popularity and adoption of Rust, organizations with millions of lines of C++ in a flagship product, wouldn't find it practical to rewrite that code in Rust within a reasonable timeframe. The new Interop Initiative is designed to make the decision and process of investing in Rust smoother for organizations that are currently largely using C++.

The Rust Foundation's first Interop Initiative task will be to draft a scope of work proposal for discussion. This will take account of the work already carried out by the Rust Project, and the work other organizations have down in this area such as KDAB's work on bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.

The Rust Foundation says the initiative will probably include the hiring of one or more Interop Initiative engineers and may include the provision of resources towards expanding on existing interoperability work, build system integration, using AI for C++ to Rust conversion, or some combination of all these.

"Google believes in the critical role that memory safe languages like Rust play and the urgent need to address memory safety in a variety of domains"

said Lars Bergstrom, Rust Foundation Board Chair and Member Director for Google.

"We are supporting the Rust Foundation's Interop Initiative because greater interoperability with C++ will be key to Rust's adoption and allow for more organizations and communities to benefit from memory-safe systems."

More Information

Rust Foundation Website

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