Tag: google

We are pleased to announce that moving forward, the Chromium project is going to support the use of third-party Rust libraries from C++ in Chromium. To do so, we are now actively pursuing adding a production Rust toolchain to our build system. This will enable us to include Rust code in the Chrome binary within the next year. We’re starting slow and setting clear expectations on what libraries we will consider once we’re ready.

In this blog post, we will discuss how we arrived at the decision to support third-party Rust libraries at this time, and not broader usage of Rust in Chromium.

Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust. For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced.

We'd need to solve these before considering Rust as (nearly) a first-class citizen in our codebase. If we can’t solve these, Rust would at best be isolated to “leaf nodes” which don’t interact much with the rest of our codebase. And if that’s all we can use Rust for, that calls into question whether the costs of an extra language are justified in the first place.