Microsoft launches the development kit in GitHub to help developers write Windows drivers in Rust.

CTOnews.com September 27 news, Microsoft Azure chief technology officer Mark Russinovich recently published a post on the X platform, Microsoft recently announced the "expansion of the adoption of Rust language results," Microsoft also released a series of development kits in GitHub, so that developers can use Rust language to write Windows drivers.

As early as July 2019, Microsoft Research stated that Microsoft wanted to "eliminate an entire class of vulnerabilities before they occur" and that "one of the most promising newer systems programming languages that meets these requirements is the Rust programming language originally invented by Mozilla."

CTOnews.com, Microsoft Research Institute, found that most of the current Windows drivers are written in C or C++, and Mark Russinovich wrote last year that C / C++ should no longer be used for security and reliability reasons, but should be used instead for more secure Rust language development projects.

▲ Source Mark Russinovich's post on Platform X However, Mark Russinovich's post received many objections at that time, and many comments thought it was "unrealistic idea."

Microsoft was originally a founding member of the Rust Foundation, and despite a lot of opposition, Microsoft is still moving in the direction of Rust, and Mark Russinovich claimed in May that Microsoft will rewrite Windows 11 core in Rust.

▲ Source Mark Russinovich posted a post on the X platform and Microsoft recently published the windows-drivers-rs development kit on GitHub, which aims to enable developers to develop Windows drivers using the Rust language.

According to the release notes for the new driver kit based on Rust, it aims to support both WDM (Windows Driver Model) and WDF (Windows Driver Framework) drivers. WDM drivers are lower-level and tightly tied to the operating system, while WDF drivers interact with the system through framework libraries. The focus of the initial repository is WDK.

However, the project is still in the "early development stage," and developers are not officially advised to use it for commercial purposes, but the community is welcome to experiment, suggest and discuss it.

Related reading: Microsoft rewrites Azure Quantum development tool with Rust language, allegedly "performance improves by more than 100 times"