The Rust Revolution in Engineering Systems: Real-World Examples from the Lab to the Factory Floor

I've been writing automation software for scientists and engineers for nearly 30 years, starting at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab automating spectroscopy systems. Languages come and go. Rust is different--and worth paying attention to.

Rust changes how we build mission‑critical systems. Its ownership model and strict, helpful compiler prevent sloppy memory and dataflow. The result is code that, once it compiles, tends to have fewer runtime bugs and clearer behavior.

This isn’t theoretical. Volvo vehicles are already rolling off assembly lines with Rust components. Satellites orbit with Rust onboard. Manufacturers deploy it on the factory floor. After decades of C/C++ dominance (and LabVIEW’s success in test and measurement) Rust delivers C‑level performance with compile‑time memory safety and zero runtime overhead.

Why this matters now

Three forces converged in 2024-2025 to move Rust from interesting to essential:

• Regulatory pressure: The White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD)’s technical report, “Back to the Building Blocks” (Feb 26, 2024), calls for adoption of memory‑safe programming languages (e.g., Rust, Python, Java, C#, Go, Swift). CISA and the FBI warned on Feb 12, 2025 that malicious actors are actively exploiting buffer overflows—calling them “unforgivable defects”—and urged use of memory‑safe languages. Procurement requirements follow.
• Safety certification: Ferrocene achieved ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 62304 Class C qualification, removing a major barrier to adopting Rust in safety‑critical automotive and medical devices.
• Production validation: Volvo’s EX90 and Polestar 3 ship with Rust‑powered ECUs. Their lead architect reports “we got much higher quality” and far fewer bugs than with C/C++.

The numbers are hard to ignore:

• A majority of severe vulnerabilities in large software platforms are memory‑safety issues, which is the class Rust prevents at compile time.
• Android saw a 68% drop in memory‑safety vulnerabilities as Rust adoption grew, with zero such issues in Android’s Rust code to date.
• A Communications of the ACM position piece called to standardize memory‑safety practices, reflecting industry‑wide recognition.
• And fixes late in the lifecycle are often dramatically more expensive--older studies suggest order‑of‑magnitude increases; exact multipliers vary by context (source PMI). That makes this an engineering decision, not a trend.

Infrastructure momentum

• Linux kernel: Rust support merged in 6.1 (Dec 2022). Greg Kroah‑Hartman has called it a tipping point for more Rust drivers in production.
• Microsoft Windows: Windows 11 includes the win32kbase_rs.sys kernel module. Microsoft rewrote ~36,000 lines of kernel code in Rust; their CTO says it’s “more maintainable, more reliable, and easier to evolve” than C++.
• Cloud and virtualization: Cloudflare replaced NGINX with Pingora (Rust), achieving ~70% lower CPU and ~67% lower memory usage versus their old proxy, plus major connection‑reuse gains; about ~20% of websites use Cloudflare (per W3Techs). Amazon’s Rust‑based Firecracker runs trillions of Lambda executions monthly, launches microVMs in ~125 ms, and has a compact ~50K LoC Rust codebase compared to QEMU’s >1.4M lines of C (reducing attack surface).

When Linux, Windows, and the infrastructure powering a fifth of the web adopt the same language, that’s a shift--not a fad.

Real‑world control systems and instrumentation

Aerospace: flight‑critical software

• K2 Space builds satellites in Rust--flight and ground systems. Their software controls propulsion (including a 20kW Hall‑effect thruster), guidance, thermal, power, and comms. First demo mission: Jan 2025.
• China’s Tianyi‑33 launched Dec 2023 running RROS-Rust RTOS, handling positioning and scientific data with guaranteed response times.

Defense: security by design

• DARPA’s TRACTOR program (Translating All C TO Rust) uses AI to convert legacy C for DoD systems to eliminate memory‑safety bugs. “Rust forces the programmer to get things right.”
• Anduril advertises Rust use across multiple product areas, including electronic warfare, autonomous drones (Ghost, Anvil, Bolt, Altius), and C2 systems.

Medical devices: compliance meets safety

• Ferrocene: first open‑source qualified Rust toolchain for IEC 62304 Class C, enabling Class III devices.
• Teton.ai: thousands of Rust‑powered patient monitoring devices; vendor‑reported >99% uptime and a 25% reduction in night‑shift workloads in early trials (not independently verified).

Biotech: high‑performance analysis

• Oxford Nanopore uses Rust in production and maintains Rust‑based tooling (e.g., Dorado) for sequencing, real‑time basecalling, and thread‑safe parallelism.
• Sage proteomics: ~2,500 PSMs/CPU‑second; 5× faster than MSFragger, 20× than Comet, 150× than IdentiPy, 500× than MSGF+.

Manufacturing and industrial automation

• EVA ICS v4: full SCADA/DCS in Rust. Millions of objects on a node; Modbus/OPC‑UA/SNMP; vendor‑reported <100µs latency in real‑time mode and “zero runtime failures” after rewriting Python for speed and security.
• Step Function I/O: Rust DNP3 and Modbus powering grid control and SCADA; (vendor‑reported) zero runtime failures in production.
• Infineon AURIX Rust support with IEC 61508 docs up to SIL‑3 for a single MCU (SIL‑4 achievable via 2oo2 architectures) for BMS, motor control, and automation.

Robotics: autonomous systems

• Parallel Systems: autonomous battery‑electric rail in Rust; ~$100M raised; FRA‑approved 160‑mile Georgia pilot (April 2025).
• dora‑rs: dataflow robotics with zero‑copy messaging; project‑reported 10–17× lower latency than ROS 2 (Python API benchmarks).

The LabVIEW connection: integration, not replacement

If you’ve invested heavily in LabVIEW (much of test, measurement, and automation has), Rust is a complement and not a threat. LabVIEW remains unmatched for rapid hardware interfacing, NI ecosystem integration, and dataflow‑friendly parallelism.

The better news: Rust ↔ LabVIEW integration is proven and production‑ready. I wrote up how to call Rust from LabVIEW. At JKI we’ve shipped it! These include a cross‑platform TOML library wrapping Rust’s toml_edit and a high‑performance HTTP client:

• toml-edit-labview
• reqwest-rs-labview

How the integration works (in practice):

1. Build Rust into a shared library (.dll, .so, .framework) with a C‑compatible API.
2. Call it from LabVIEW via FFI.
3. Leverage Rust’s ecosystem (protocols, file formats, crypto, algorithms) while keeping LabVIEW’s strengths for hardware I/O, visualization, and rapid iteration.

LabVIEW and Rust feel surprisingly similar: pass‑by‑value semantics, strong type safety, and careful thinking about ownership/borrowing. And LabVIEW is itself memory‑safe, so the hybrid keeps the core safety benefits.

The learning‑curve reality

Teams ask: “How steep is this?” Data helps:

• Google surveyed 1,000+ developers: 67% felt confident in Rust within two months. “Teams are more productive… with lower defect rates.”
• Microsoft engineers report: if Rust compiles, it generally works as expected. Reviews move faster when the compiler guarantees memory safety; testing focuses on business logic, not use‑after‑free and data races.
• Expect 2-4 months to productivity parity. After that, compile‑time guarantees shift defects left and speed up delivery.

What you should do next

• Pick a small, meaningful pilot (not safety‑critical).
• Train 2-3 senior engineers.
• Prototype integration with existing systems.
• Measure ruthlessly: dev time, bug density, performance, team sentiment.

If you’re a LabVIEW shop: keep LabVIEW for hardware interfacing, visualization, and rapid prototyping. Use Rust for complex algorithms, protocols, cross‑platform libraries, and security‑critical subsystems. At JKI, we applied this to our high performance HTTP client and robust TOML file reader/writer libraries for LabVIEW, and the new VIPM Command-Line Interface (shipping in VIPM 2026 Preview).

For greenfield systems (especially cross‑platform or security‑sensitive) Rust is increasingly a solid default. Certified toolchains exist. Vendor support is here. The talent pool is growing.

The path forward

The Rust revolution in cyber‑physical systems isn’t coming--it’s here. It’s shipping in vehicles, running in data centers, controlling factories, analyzing DNA, and powering everything from Linux and Windows to cloud platforms.

At JKI, we’ve spent 25 years helping engineering teams deliver--from automated test equipment to medical devices to industrial control. Our work integrating Rust with LabVIEW shows these technologies complement each other.

We’re not zealots insisting on rewrites. We’re pragmatists. The teams that win in the next decade will build optionality into their technology strategy.

If you’re building control systems, instrumentation, test equipment, or any cyber‑physical system where reliability and performance matter, now’s a good time to evaluate what Rust can do for you.

The views here are my own, shared in the hope they help others. Please take what works, leave the rest, and share your successes.

Want to explore Rust integration strategies for your team? Reach out to JKI to discuss how memory‑safe development can reduce technical risk while accelerating innovation.