For many years, C has effectively been the “lingua franca” of the computing world. It’s pretty hard to combine code from two different programming languages in the same process–unless one of them is C. The same could theoretically be true for Rust, but in practice there are a number of obstacles that make that harder than it needs to be. Building out silky smooth language interop should be a core goal of helping Rust to target foundational applications. I think the right way to do this is not by extending rustc with knowledge of other programming languages but rather by building on Rust’s core premise of being an extensible language. By investing in building out an “extensible compiler” we can allow crate authors to create a plethora of ergonomic, efficient bridges between Rust and other languages.

Rust turns 10 this year. It’s a good time to take a look at where we are and where I think we need to be going. This post is the first in a series I’m calling “Rust in 2025”. This first post describes my general vision for how Rust fits into the computing landscape. The remaining posts will outline major focus areas that I think are needed to make this vision come to pass. Oh, and fair warning, I’m expecting some controversy along the way—at least I hope so, since otherwise I’m just repeating things everyone knows.