Really, anyone senior in Microsoft shouldn't be making this sort of argument. They already have a perfectly fine memory safe language that they could use way more widely than they already do. The number of bugs in Windows that either shouldn't happen or are too hard to debug when they do, because Microsoft insist on still using C++ instead of C#, is just phenomenal. Why can Google ship a mobile OS in which large chunks including the entire GUI layer run on a JVM, but Microsoft can't ship memory safe code in Windows for even the non-performance sensitive parts because they have some irrational fear of C#?
The issues there are obviously cultural. If Rust is hard-man enough to convince Microsoft devs to adopt it when they otherwise reject C# then fine, whatever, do what it takes. But to generalize this to the rest of the software industry is silly. Most of us have been writing code in memory safe languages for a very long time, and they could be used way more widely than they are. If you want to make more code memory safe you'd be better off advancing .NET ngen or JVM AOT at this point than pushing Rust, at least they can handle arbitrary data structures in safe ways.
> Why can Google ship a mobile OS in which large chunks including the entire GUI layer run on a JVM
I'm sorry but what the fuck. I paid my fucking phone 1k€ and yet it's bewilderingly slower than a RPi4 with a native apps stack. Every single interaction in the UI is slow and has some amount of lag, even with a 120fps screen. Android is to me the very best argument against Java there is - who knows how many tens of thousands of man-hours spent into optimizing it and it just does not perform to any acceptable level even with best in class hardware. It also has the most app crashes I have seen on any platform.
Really, anyone senior in Microsoft shouldn't be making this sort of argument. They already have a perfectly fine memory safe language that they could use way more widely than they already do. The number of bugs in Windows that either shouldn't happen or are too hard to debug when they do, because Microsoft insist on still using C++ instead of C#, is just phenomenal. Why can Google ship a mobile OS in which large chunks including the entire GUI layer run on a JVM, but Microsoft can't ship memory safe code in Windows for even the non-performance sensitive parts because they have some irrational fear of C#?
The issues there are obviously cultural. If Rust is hard-man enough to convince Microsoft devs to adopt it when they otherwise reject C# then fine, whatever, do what it takes. But to generalize this to the rest of the software industry is silly. Most of us have been writing code in memory safe languages for a very long time, and they could be used way more widely than they are. If you want to make more code memory safe you'd be better off advancing .NET ngen or JVM AOT at this point than pushing Rust, at least they can handle arbitrary data structures in safe ways.