We spend most of the year looking ahead. There’s always another project to wrap up, a client who needs a hand, a technical puzzle waiting to be solved, or a deadline circled on the calendar. Someone is usually learning something new, and there’s always another goal just over the next ridge.That forw...
Built to Hold Up: Why We Use Rust
Web Design & Development | Adam Post | Friday, October 30, 2026
Overview
Most of what our development team builds doesn’t need Rust. Websites, forms, dashboards and integrations are better served by mainstream tools that plenty of developers know and that are easy to keep updated.
A few jobs are different.
When software checks whether a backup will restore, records a transaction that can’t go missing, or runs on a server that’s already struggling, how it behaves on a bad day matters more than how quickly it was written. For those jobs, we often build in Rust.
Rust has gone from a niche language to one that Google, Microsoft and the Linux kernel now rely on. This article explains what it is, why that shift happened, and how to tell whether a project of yours is one of the few that needs it.
What Is Rust, and Why Do Developers Trust It?
Rust is a programming language built around one promise most languages can’t make. Whole categories of bugs get caught before the program is allowed to run.
That matters because of where serious software bugs come from. In 2019, Microsoft’s security team reported that about 70% of the security vulnerabilities it catalogs each year are memory safety issues. The Chromium project, which builds the engine behind Google Chrome, has published almost the same figure for its serious security bugs. Across Microsoft’s products and in Chrome, one kind of mistake accounts for most of the security problems.
What does “memory safe” actually mean?
Every program borrows memory from the computer while it runs, and it has to hand that memory back correctly. Older languages leave that bookkeeping entirely to the programmer. Most of the time, the programmer gets it right. When they don’t, the result can be a crash, scrambled data, or an opening an attacker can use.
Many newer languages handle the bookkeeping automatically, with a background process that tidies up while the program runs. That’s safer, though it costs some speed and some predictability.
Rust takes a third route. Before the program is finished, Rust checks how it handles memory and refuses to produce a working program if the rules are broken. The Rust project says this is what lets it “guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety,” which in plain terms means the mistake gets caught on the developer’s desk.
Has switching to Rust actually worked anywhere?
It has, and the clearest evidence comes from Android. Google didn’t rewrite Android. It started writing new code in memory-safe languages, Rust among them, and left most of the older, well-tested code where it was. Memory safety issues fell from 76% of Android’s vulnerabilities in 2019 to an estimated 24% in 2024. In November 2025, Google reported they had dropped below 20% for the first time.
The part that surprised people was speed. Google found that medium and large Rust changes were rolled back about four times less often than comparable changes in
Rust is now a permanent part of the Linux kernel as well, the core of the operating system that runs a large share of the world’s servers. Kernel developers ended its experimental status in December 2025.
Is the government telling businesses to use it?
No, and this is where a lot of articles overstate things. CISA, the NSA and the FBI, along with partner agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, have published guidance urging software makers to plan a move to memory-safe languages. A 2024 report from the White House Office of the National Cyber Director made the same argument. All of it is voluntary guidance rather than law, and the firmest recommendations are aimed at companies whose software supports critical infrastructure.
For a typical business there’s no compliance obligation here. What’s useful is that the organizations with the most data on how software fails reached the same conclusion and put it in writing.
Not sure what your next project should be built in? Ask our development team for a build recommendation before you commit to a tool.
When Should a Business Use Rust?
We reach for Rust when software can’t afford to fail quietly, or when it has to run well on a machine that’s already under strain. Here are some examples where Rust is a good choice.
Why does a backup check need to be so reliable?
A backup is only worth something if it restores. A backup job can report success while skipping files or saving damaged copies, and nobody finds out until the day they need it. Checking at the file level means opening what was saved and confirming it matches what should have been saved, often across a very large number of files, every time the backup runs. A checker that crashes halfway through, or skips something without saying so, defeats its own purpose, because the whole point of the check is that you can stop worrying about it. Our team has written more on why backups alone aren’t a disaster recovery plan.
What about software that handles money?
Software that records sales has to run all day and continue running when something goes wrong, like a card reader that stops responding or a connection that drops halfway through a sale.
In many languages, nothing forces a developer to handle those cases. They get dealt with later, if somebody remembers. Rust won’t let code use the result of something that might have failed until the developer has said what happens if it did. They still have to make the right call, but they can’t forget to make one.
Why would troubleshooting tools be written in Rust?
Picture a server whose disk is filling up, and nobody knows why. The tool that finds out has to look through a very large number of files, on a machine that’s already short of space and struggling. A heavy tool can make the problem worse while it’s looking for it.
A Rust program typically builds into a single self-contained file, with nothing extra to install on the server, and it’s memory efficient. When a technician is in the middle of an outage, that’s exactly what you want.
When Is Rust the Wrong Choice?
More often than not.
Most projects don’t need what Rust offers, and it comes with trade-offs. It’s slower to build than many languages, and in a 2022 survey of Google’s own developers, slow build times were by far the biggest complaint. It also takes time to learn. In the same survey, about a third of developers were as productive in Rust as in other languages within two months, and more than half within four. For a marketing site or a simple internal form, that cost buys you very little, and a mainstream tool kept up to date is the better answer. Who builds it matters more than what it’s built in, which is the same point we made about what separates one developer from another.
You don’t need to decide this yourself; picking the language is our job, and it starts with the things you’d tell us: what the software must do and what happens if it stops. If a quiet failure would cost you real money, or the software has to run on hardware that’s already stretched, Rust is worth a conversation. If not, a more common language will do the job and be easier to find help for later.
If you already have software that works, don’t rewrite it in Rust. Android’s results came from new code, and older code that has been tested for years has had most of its problems shaken out. Use Rust for the next piece that has to hold up, and connect it to what you already run, the same way we approach Power Apps and Power BI projects.
Ask for a Build Recommendation
The right language for a project depends on what it has to do on a bad day. Tell us what your software needs to do, what it connects to and what happens if it stops, and our developers will recommend what to build it in. Sometimes that’s Rust. Often it’s something simpler, and we’ll tell you that too.
If the project is a website, our website bundle plans cover hosting, updates and ongoing support, and the Custom plan brings in our senior development team for add-ons and integrations.
Ask for a build recommendation or call us at (570) 321-7370.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Rust only for big tech companies? No. Google, Microsoft and the Linux kernel get the headlines because they publish their data, but the same reasoning applies to a single business system or a small utility. What matters is how costly a quiet failure would be.
Does Rust make software more secure? It prevents a large class of memory-related bugs, which account for most serious security vulnerabilities at Microsoft and in Chrome. It doesn’t prevent logic mistakes or bad configuration, so the rest of good security practice still applies.
Is software written in Rust faster? Often. Rust runs in the same performance range as the fastest established languages, without a background cleanup process slowing it down. For most websites and forms, you wouldn’t notice the difference.
Is Rust harder to maintain? Google’s experience in Android suggests Rust code is easier to change safely, since many mistakes are caught before the code ships. The harder part is people. Fewer developers know Rust, so ask who will support it before you commit.
Does my business website need Rust? Almost certainly not. A well-built site on a mainstream platform, kept updated, is the right answer for nearly every business. Rust can occasionally help with a feature that needs unusual speed in the browser, but it earns its place mostly in the systems behind the website.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam is a core member of the Intrada team, working in software engineering, Linux system administration, and web development. He splits his time between writing code and helping keep projects, and the people working on them, moving in the right direction. He likes staying close to the technical work while also being someone the team can lean on to keep things organized.
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