Also Apple, fwiw. I just left a job doing rust there a few months ago (for another job doing rust at another FAANG). But if you have an iphone and use icloud, rust code has probably been involved in some part of your daily life (just not on the phone itself) for the last couple of years.
Rust usage at these companies isn't yet 'large' in the sense of KLoC or anything, especially compared to existing legacy codebases, but it's getting put in at some really critical infrastructure levels that are unlikely to do anything but grow imo.
That's kind of the thing about rust though. That's where it's got the most power to improve things, so its introduction to a workspace is kind of subtle.
Oh that's interesting, I kept saying Apple is the only "big tech" company not using Rust. (Huawei should probably also be considered "big tech", but they are also using Rust.) But with Apple being as closed as they are, I guess it's not too surprising that one doesn't hear much about it...
Is there any public source for Apple using Rust?
And yeah those are exactly the domains Rust is designed for, and even if it doesn't mean huge codebases, that kind of usage at a whole bunch of huge companies hopefully means Rust is more likely to survive beyond the initial hype. :)
That particular posting has been up in some form forever. I'm always tempted to apply, since I'm from Edmonton area originally, and my whole family is there, and I do Rust. I've always found it curious that that posting exists, since Apple has no other presence there.
But a) it's Apple, a stressy, workaholic company to work for [at least that's how it seemed when my wife worked there] and b) I'd never convince the wife and kids to move right now.
It's the team I worked on. Apple has had an office in the Edmonton area for about 9 years now, originally in camrose (which if you're from here you'll probably think is hilarious), now in downtown Edmonton (the move was during COVID lockdown). It's generally been about a 10 person team, give or take, but recently split into two teams that are both doing rust in different areas.
It's a surprising location and the story behind it existing is fun but also not mine to tell, but if you applied and interviewed you'd almost certainly get to hear it. The stuff that team does is much more important than its location would suggest and the software they build was mostly originally in C (not c++), which is also kind of surprising for the services side of apple. We were involved in porting swift to Linux in the hopes it would meet our needs but that didn't work out for various silly reasons.
At any rate it's not the only part of apple using rust, but it is probably the earliest adopter and also the most mission critical user there.
> But a) it's Apple, a stressy, workaholic company to work for [at least that's how it seemed when my wife worked there] and b) I'd never convince the wife and kids to move right now.
Fwiw this team isn't really any of those things, it's very unusual in a lot of ways. Very good work life balance, especially now that the office isn't an hour from a real city.
I didn't leave on bad terms at all, I just needed a change of scenery and the one big downside to that office is you can't really go to any other teams because Apple is so dead set against remote or distributed teams without a shared office space, so you're just kinda stuck. Also I ran out my patience for not being able to work on open source unrelated to my job (though at least it got easier to work on open source related to my job over the time I did work there).
I looked around for work in Rust inside Google a year or so before I left and it was only some small parts of Fuchsia and not anything hiring at my site.
But I'm sure it's growing. But it won't be in the core Google3-on-Borg parts of Google, which are on the whole in either C++ or (increasingly) Go. Switching to a standardized garbage collected Google supported language makes sense in that domain. The "Carbon" stuff recently announced sounds interesting as well.
The long term looks good for Rust. But actual production code is still thin on the ground still everywhere.
(disclaimer: I work on Fuchsia, not speaking on behalf of my employer, feel free to clone the source repo and make your own analysis)
FWIW, to the best of my memory as of a year ago I counted ~1.1 MLoC of Rust code in our open source tree, with an additional ~1.3 MLoC in things we've vendored from crates.io.
There was a bit more C++ when I did the analysis, but it was the same order of magnitude.
Good to hear. A few years ago, there was a team advertising on grow/ for Fuchsia & Rust (for networking stuff I think), and they advertised in Waterloo but when I inquired, the posting went away and I was told they weren't actually hiring at my site. shrug Maybe it was my bad breath.
Other than that... Fuchsia was the thing that was rewriting all my work from scratch and killing everything I worked on (Chromecast on Home Hub, etc), so... :-)
