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pjmlp

Microsoft is a bit schizophrenic in Rust's adoption.

In one side of the fence you have Azure IoT Edge, done in a mix of .NET and Rust.

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/09/30/building-the-azur...

On the other side you have the Azure Sphere OS with a marketing story about secure IoT, yet the SDK is C only,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/app-developmen...

To the point they did a blog post trying to defend their use of C,

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things-bl...

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> To the point they did a blog post trying to defend their use of C,

I do a lot of Rust work, but C still occupies a prominent place in my toolkit.

In fact, this is fairly standard among all of the professionals I know. The idea that companies need to abandon C and only do Rust as soon as possible is more of an idealistic idea on internet communities.

Sure, but they should be honest about it instead of marketing Azure Sphere OS as an unbreakable castle, when it happens to be built in quick sand.

Additionally they could also allow for all GCC languages like Ada and C++, given it is the SDK toolchain, instead of being C only, if the security marketing from Azure Sphere is to be taken seriously.

> Microsoft is a bit schizophrenic in Rust's adoption.

It's only "schizophrenic" to the degree that you expect an organization of thousands of individuals to behave like a single human mind.

I expect the business unit that sells "secure" IoT devices, to follow the guidelines from Microsoft Security Response Center, but that is expecting too much I guess.

Expecting a Profit Center to follow instructions from a Cost Center is akin to expecting the US Congress to act on advice from the General Accounting Office.

It is a matter of who calls the shots, and what happens when guidelines are ignored.

Given your description apparently on US Gov anyone can get away with not following them, no wonder an US company acts accordingly.

Generally when MSRC files security issues, they tend to get fixed quickly and across not just the current release but previous ones too.

> Microsoft is a bit schizophrenic in Rust's adoption.

This is pretty famously not limited to Microsoft's views on Rust. Probably at any sufficiently large company, though Microsoft is the tech company that gets most discussed about. At a previous employer, there was a division that was gung ho on Go and React, while another was Java and Ember.

Interesting that MS would adopt Go or Java. I would have thought that everything in the GC'd lang space would have to be C#. Is java common there?

To clarify, my previous company (the one which had Go and Java) is not Microsoft

Ah, I misread the context

My point was more related to the views on security than Rust.

Microsoft Security advises 1. managed languages, 2. Rust, 3. C++ with Core Guidelines.

Then comes out this group selling "secure IoT" devices with a C only SDK.

I don’t know the product, but you could certainly make a “secure iot “ device with C. Formal verification is again the search term you seek. System states. State machines being a good metaphor. Array bound checking doesn’t really matter if it’s a statically allocated array of a fixed known size. Arguably dynamic code vs static code is a bigger issue than language choice, and you see static code here in Hubris, and they explain why, so it’s not just about Rust but about the system design

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