According to a recently posted job offering for a position at its Prague-based offices, Microsoft is looking to hire a Principal Software Architect for the Microsoft 365...
It's less the job post, more the implication, that they consider Rust to be better than (their internally developed) C# for one of their major products. And that I think is worth news (as it could further drive towards adoption of Rust in general).
This. C# has been losing momentum for years but some people just won't see it. I think Microsoft trying to move 365 of of it is just another big flag that devs need to start looking elsewhere.
Microsoft has been pretty open that they intend to move to Rust. They are currently re-building the Windows API in Rust as well. I do expect they will try to push .NET in that world which will be a bummer.
We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond.
So, it doesn't sound to me like they'll actively port everything. I imagine, they don't yet know where the journey is really headed, but probably have a need for performance-critical software to be rewritten in Rust.
Well, and yeah, it's going to be a team and they're only really going to maybe port one or two services, to figure out what technologies work well.
I suspect they will port core software running on the cloud first, running C# and chomping tops of RAM and CPU because reasons. Rust helps with both, but it takes time to port. Frontend apps will be the last thing will bring to Rust, maybe using WASM, and to avoid tools, use the same WASM packaged with Chromium for their standalone "apps" and walá: one codebase, all platforms.
I’m guessing it’s for large enterprise customers. Microsoft provides it as a service so they have to deal with scaling and the hosting. Rust can help improve performance on these large systems were it counts and can reduce hosting costs.