Shopify explains why they’re adopting Rust for systems programming, and plans to get involved with Rust in the future.

Since its inception, Shopify’s primary server-side application programming language has been Ruby. Ruby’s flexibility and expressiveness have allowed Shopify to develop a powerful commerce system that can meet the needs of millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of buyers. According to Shopify, Ruby was, is, and will be their tool of choice when building the server-side components of modern commerce.

And for systems programming, such as writing a high-performance web server, or using “native” code to extend Ruby rather than define business logic, Shopify developers have historically used languages ​​including C and Go. Now, Shopify has decided to standardize on Rust as their systems programming language. As such, the team is working to better support Rust during development and deployment, and to help Shopify engineers learn Rust programming expertise.

Shopify says that many aspects of Rust make it an attractive choice for their systems programming language. These combine to convince them that Rust will be a strong and welcome component of their software stack.

From Shopify’s point of view,Consistency, performance, community ecology, productivity, safety, and interoperability in Rustis why they adopted Rust for systems programming.

Shopify is currently part of the Rust Foundation, and for Shopify, they are at the very beginning of their Rust journey. Efforts are needed to develop educational resources and internal tooling, and learn how to best participate in the Rust community and ecosystem so that everyone can build sustainable, memory-safe, efficient software.