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Microsoft Puts Rust on the Same Level as C++
Rust has officially joined C++, C#, and TypeScript among the best-supported languages for development at Microsoft. Behind this Tier-1 language status is, above all, a Rust compiler plugged directly into the Windows development pipeline to fully integrate it.
The announcement was made in September 2026 by Victor Ciura, Principal Engineer on the Rust tooling team at Microsoft (DevDiv/CoreAI division), during RustConf in Montreal. It is detailed in a post published on September 10, 2026 on the Rust Foundation blog.
During RustConf in Montreal, Microsoft said that Rust was officially becoming a Tier-1 language. However, this is an internal Microsoft label and has nothing to do with the support levels (tier 1, 2, and 3) that the Rust project assigns to the target platforms of its compiler. Inside the Redmond company, it means that dev teams choosing Rust no longer have to piece together their own toolchain.
Microsoft now offers what it calls a "paved path", in other words, a clear route from the developer's workstation to production: secure toolchain compilation, development tools, quality workflows, integration with the company's platforms, and compliance with SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) requirements. Everything is there, and more importantly, everything is tailored to Rust.
This article is also an opportunity to recall that Rust is not new at Microsoft. We have been hearing about it for several years. For example, in 2023, I published an article about Microsoft's early work to rewrite part of the Windows 11 kernel in Rust. Today, the American vendor says it uses Rust in firmware, drivers, the kernel, hypervisors, microservices, and applications.
rustc_codegen_utc: Rust connected to the MSVC backend
The main element of this announcement is called rustc_codegen_utc. Simply put, it is a component that allows the Rust compiler to use the same engine as MSVC to generate the final code. As a reminder, MSVC is Microsoft's C/C++ compiler, shipped with Visual Studio, and it is the one used to compile Windows itself. By default, Rust relies on LLVM for this step, an open source compilation infrastructure also used by Clang (C/C++) or Swift. Now, at Microsoft, Rust and C++ can go through the same mechanism on Windows.
Why not just stick with LLVM? Because Windows and MSVC have evolved together for decades. With this backend, the security, diagnostics, and maintenance features built around MSVC become available to Rust code, without having to reimplement everything. Microsoft highlights several concrete benefits:
- Compatibility: with the Windows tooling ecosystem and its ABI.
- Security: binary hardening and code security features.
- Maintenance: compliance, analysis, and servicing after linking, including Hotpatch.
- Rust/C++ interoperability: for hybrid projects, with inlining between the two languages and SPGO (Sample Profile Guided Optimization).
- Debugging: crash dump analysis, profiling, diagnostics.
"Connecting rustc to this backend allows Rust to rely on the same platform investments, with perfect compatibility from the start, rather than requiring a parallel implementation of every Windows-specific feature," explains Victor Ciura at Microsoft.
According to the Redmond company, rustc_codegen_utc has been ready for production since early 2026. More than 100 Microsoft project repositories are already using it, and that number keeps growing over time, especially as Rust adoption increases at Microsoft.
C++ Is Not Going Away
"Rust has become a Tier-1 language at Microsoft, but C++ still dominates after decades of development," it says. That makes sense: Microsoft products, especially Windows, are not 100 lines of code... The goal is therefore not to rewrite everything, but to make the two languages coexist in the same projects. The share of Rust should gradually grow, all while using a shared backend at the development level.
Even so, security remains a real issue for Microsoft. During his keynote at RustConf 2025, Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, pointed out that around 70% of Windows CVEs were tied to memory issues. That is exactly the kind of vulnerability Rust is able to reduce by design. A language that keeps winning over developers...
