Post:
If you’re still shipping load‑bearing code in C, C++, Python, or vanilla JavaScript in 2025, you’re gambling with house money and calling it “experience.”
As systems scale, untyped or foot‑gun‑heavy languages don’t just get harder to work with—they hit a complexity cliff. Every new feature is another chance for a runtime type error or a memory bug to land in prod. Now layer LLM‑generated glue code on top of that. More code, more surface area, less anyone truly understands. In that world, “we’ll catch it in tests” is wishful thinking, not a strategy.
We don’t live in 1998 anymore. We have languages that:
- Make whole classes of bugs unrepresentable (Rust, TypeScript)
- Give you memory safety and concurrency sanity by default (Rust, Go)
- Provide static structure that both humans and LLMs can lean on as guardrails, not red tape
At this point, choosing C/C++ for safety‑critical paths, or dynamic languages for the core of a large system, isn’t just “old school.” It’s negligence with better marketing.
Use Rust, Go, or TypeScript for anything that actually matters. Use Python/JS at the edges, for scripts and prototypes.
For production, load‑bearing paths in 2025 and beyond, anything else is you saying, out loud:
“I’m okay with avoidable runtime failures and undefined behavior in my critical systems.”
Are you?
Comment:
Nonsense. If your code has reached the point of unmaintainable complexity, then blame the author, not the language.
Not an embedded dev. What’s the Rust situation in the embedded world? Is it ever used?
In my corner of the embedded world, it feels like everyone is practically jumping to integrate Rust. In the sense that vendors which haven’t had to innovate for 10+ years will suddenly publish a Rust API out of the blue. And I’m saying “out of the blue”, but I do also regularly hear from other devs, that they’ve been pestering the vendors to provide a Rust API or even started writing own wrappers for their C APIs.
And while it’s certainly a factor that Rust is good, in my experience they generally just want to get away from C. Even our management is well aware that C is a liability.
I guess, I should add that while I say “jumping”, this is the embedded world where everything moves extremely slowly, so we’re talking about a multi-year jump. In our field, you need to get certifications for your toolchain and code quality, for example, so lots of work is necessary to formalize all of that.
I’ve been an embedded developer for coming up on 20 years at this point, and recently went through a job hunt. Of the three that made it to the offer stage, two used Rust almost exclusively in their embedded stack and one used Rust in their embedded LInux stack and was trying to decide if they were going to use rust in their bare-metal/RTOS stack. I ended up at on of the Rust places, though I had no Rust experience. I have to say, while I do find many parts of the syntax too cute by half, in general I’m pretty happy with it as an embedded language. My current target architectures are ARM Cortex-M7 and Cortex-A53. In general toolchain, and debugger support has been good, peripheral support has been ok but could use improvement.
Bindings have been getting added to the Linux kernel so drivers can theoretically be written in Rust
Android has moved its IPC mechanism, Binder, over to Rust
I know that some people have managed to get it working but I have yet to see it in practice. Granted, my experience in the industries is currently only what I learned during my studies and 2 internships.
In general, C is supported. C++ is sometimes supported and very few people even talk about Rust.
It’s not widely used. Some car manufacturers(Toyota if I remember correctly) have started testing it. Some parts are really nice.
There is exactly one hal for i2c, spi and Io pins. As long as both your chip and peripheral driver implement against it, it just works. There are more unified abstractions in the work for things like DMA, but they are not officially stable yet.
Cooperative Multi threading can easily be integrated thanks to Async rust and executors like embassy.
All the crates that are no_std compatible can be included.
It’s not perfect, but it’s getting there.
Rust is more of a C++ replacement, no? Rather go with Odin or Zig or C3 for systemic stuff?
You often just want to go with what’s popular, since hardware vendors will only provide APIs for select languages.
Well, and depending on the field, you may need to get certifications for your toolchain and such, so then you have to use what’s popular.
Not really. The things where C++ used to shine are usually best done in higher level languages.
Rust is a great C replacement.
It’s fast and memory secure, so it’s good for stuff you might do in C but you don’t want to risk a memory leak or segmentation fault.
I thought more in the way of atomic dependencies and how it handles features in-language vs. in-code and reliance on toolchain vs. standalone. In short, how you as a programmer are supposed to use it.