Wingfoil, our ultra-low latency data streaming framework, is built in Rust, a powerful programming language that’s becoming increasingly popular and important over the last few years, claiming the top spot as the “most loved programming language” in Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey for the last 8 years, with 87% of developers expressing love for the language in 2023. But we didn’t just pick Rust because it was popular, we decided to build Wingfoil in Rust, because it’s a powerful language that offers some significant advantages over established languages like C++, and Java.
A brief history of Rust
Rust began as a personal project by developer Graydon Hoare in 2006. But it wasn’t born in a vacuum; it was created to solve a specific, longstanding problem, i.e creating a language that had the speed of C++, but without the memory safety bugs like buffer overflows and “use-after-free” that can make it a difficult language to develop with.
By 2009, Mozilla began sponsoring the project, intending to use it for their experimental browser engine, Servo – browser intended to be parallel, secure, and fast. This was at the height of the second browser war, where speed and performance were vital. And though it took a while to find an audience, as it matured developers interested in speed and performance started to notice and adopt it.
Rust’s ‘killer feature’
Rust’s ‘killer feature’ is its ownership system, a paradigm shift in memory management.
- languages like C++ require manual memory management, which is fast but notoriously difficult to get right.
- languages like Java and Go use a ‘garbage collector’ to automatically clean up memory, which simplifies development but adds runtime overhead and can cause unpredictable ‘pauses’ in performance.
Rust provides a third path. Its borrow checker – a powerful tool in the compile – analyses how your program uses memory before it ever runs. It enforces a strict set of rules about who can read and write data at any given time. If the rules are broken, the code won’t compile. This gives Rust a clear advantage:
- Microsoft reports that 70% of security vulnerabilities in their products stem from simple memory safety issues.
- Google’s Android team found that memory safety bugs account for 65% of high-severity vulnerabilities.
Rust eliminates entire classes of these bugs – buffer overflows, use-after-free, and double-free errors – without the runtime performance cost of a garbage collector. When Dropbox rewrote its file storage engine from Go to Rust, they achieved a 50% reduction in memory usage while handling the same workload. This isn’t just theoretical safety; it’s practical efficiency.
Rust – performance and productivity
In the past developers had to decide between productivity and speed: for example, Java was more productive, but less performant than C++. With Rust, you don’t have to have to choose one or the other. Rust consistently performs within 5-10% of C++ in benchmark tests, often matching or exceeding it. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game shows Rust outperforming Java by 2-3x in most tests and Go by 3-5x in CPU-intensive tasks. And it does this while offering the productivity of Java. And Rust is now used by many large organisations where performance is critical:
- Discord replaced their Go services with Rust, reducing tail latency from 40ms to under 5ms.
- Figma’s Rust-based multiplayer engine handles 100x more concurrent users than their previous TypeScript implementation.
- Cloudflare’s WASM runtime built in Rust processes requests 50% faster than their previous C++ implementation.
And there are other, perhaps less well know benefits to using Rust, for example it is also very energy efficient – in benchmark studies on programming language energy consumption, Rust has shown significantly lower energy consumption than Java and especially Python: for some tasks Rust consumed around ~50% of the energy of Java, and for certain Python workloads the energy consumption was several times (often 5×-75×) higher than Rust.
A booming Rust ecosystem and big tech adoption
Like any new technology driving adoption can be a struggle, even when the benefits are clear and manifest. And there are good reasons for this, for example, it’s hard to learn new languages and expensive to swap out technologies. But Rust is pretty mature now – Rust’s package manager, Cargo, hosts over 100,000 “crates” (packages), growing at 40% year-over-year. More importantly, the industry’s biggest players are betting big on Rust for their most critical systems:
- Amazon built their Firecracker VM technology (powering AWS Lambda) in Rust.
- Google is integrating Rust into Android and Chrome for security-critical components.
- Meta (Facebook) uses Rust for their Mononoke source control system.
- The Linux kernel itself, a 30-year-old C codebase, now supports writing modules in Rust.
- Microsoft is starting to rewrite core Windows components in Rust.
The numbers: Rust vs. the competition
| Language | Performance (vs. C++) | Memory Model | Key Trade-off |
| Rust | 95-105% | Ownership (Compile-time) | Strict learning curve |
| C++ | 100% (Baseline) | Manual (Runtime) | Prone to memory errors |
| Go | 30-50% | Garbage Collection (Runtime) | Easy concurrency, but GC pauses |
| Java | 40-70% | Garbage Collection (Runtime) | Mature ecosystem, but JVM overhead |
| Python | 5-15% | Garbage Collection (Runtime) | Excellent for scripts, slow for CPU tasks |
| JavaScript (Node.js) | 20-40% | Garbage Collection (Runtime) | Fast I/O, but single-threaded |
Rust isn’t perfect
Rust isn’t perfect. Its power comes with a well-known trade-off: a steep learning curve.
The ownership system and borrow checker require a mental model shift. Stack Overflow’s survey shows it takes developers an average of 6-8 months to feel productive in Rust, compared to 2-3 months for Go. However, once mastered, developers report higher confidence. GitHub’s 2023 survey found that Rust developers report 23% fewer debugging sessions compared to C++ developers. The compiler is famously strict, but its error messages are incredibly helpful, often guiding developers toward the correct solution.
Why we chose Rust for Wingfoil
There is no perfect language, but Rust offers us the best balance between performance, productivity and safety. We also believe that it’s becoming the default choice for new infrastructure, cryptocurrency systems, and security-critical applications. In the world of electronic marketplaces, speed, low-latency, and rock-solid reliability aren’t just features – they are core requirements. Rust allows us to deliver elite performance while providing the memory safety guarantees that ensure our platform is as robust and secure as it is fast.