Google Now Supports Rust for Android OS Development
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:
Google Now Supports Rust For Android Os Development - 9To5Google:
For the past few years, Google has been encouraging developers to write Android apps with Kotlin. The underlying OS still uses C and C++, though Google today announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust.
This is part of Google's work to address memory safety bugs in the operating system:
We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android's high severity security vulnerabilities.
[...] Rust provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid." Google has been working to add this support to AOSP for the past 18 months.
Performance is equivalent to the existing languages, while increasing the effectiveness of current sandboxing and reducing the overall need for it. [...] Other improvements include data concurrency, a more expressive type system, and safer integer handling.
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