Rust Becomes Shopify’s Systems Language of Choice
Shopify has standardized on Rust for systems programming and joined the Rust Foundation as an inaugural gold member. The company builds internet infrastructure for commerce, which means maintaining both flexible business logic and robust, high-performance systems. Ruby remains the primary server-side language for commerce logic, but for the lower layers of the stack—high-performance network servers, native Ruby extensions, and WebAssembly—Shopify is now committing to Rust.
The decision comes as Shopify’s base of systems programming projects grows, and as Rust’s industry momentum continues to build. The language’s combination of speed, safety, and productivity, along with its community-driven governance, made it the clear choice over alternatives like C, C++, and Go.
Why Rust? Consistency and Performance
Shopify’s systems programming needs span several domains today, and that list will likely expand. High-performance servers, Ruby extensions that bridge to other libraries or improve performance, and WebAssembly compilation all fall under this umbrella. The company wants to leverage investment in a single language across those areas, which requires a language flexible enough to handle them all.
Rust delivers predictable native-code performance with fine-grained control over memory usage, suiting the lowest levels of Shopify’s stack. While modern C++ or Go could approximate this capability, Rust offers a high performance ceiling. Notably, Rust does not inherently raise the performance floor—programmers still need to design and measure for performance—so Shopify plans to invest in tooling that makes that work easier for its Rust developers.
Safety, Productivity, and Community
Rust’s compiler helps ensure correctness through safe memory management and fearless parallelism. In Shopify’s initial projects, Rust exposed more errors at compile time than other evaluated languages, supporting the "confident to deploy" sentiment common among Rust developers. Rust also eliminates most data races in parallel programs, and Shopify believes its commitment to static safety will drive further improvements over time, such as static deadlock prevention.
Rust has a reputation for being hard to learn, but Shopify engineers have found that after an initial learning period, developers become productive and comfortable with it. The ecosystem of crates, IDE integration, and expressive type and macro systems let developers focus on intent rather than managing state and invariants manually. Compiler error messages are notably good.
The Rust language and ecosystem are driven by a healthy community, and Shopify intends to participate as it has with Ruby, Rails, and React Native. The RFC process and governance structure provide a basis for inclusive discussions about the language’s future. Shopify joined the Rust Foundation to support the maintenance of the "Rust commons" and to contribute its perspective to the broader Rust conversation.
Interoperability With Existing Code
Systems programming often requires interfacing with native C libraries. Because Rust has no garbage collector, it can plug in anywhere C can be used. Tools like bindgen support C integration, while crates such as rb-sys and magnus enable safe interop with Ruby. C++ integration remains somewhat awkward, but crates like cxx help bridge that gap. Shopify does not maintain a large C or C++ codebase outside the Ruby VM itself, but interoperability was nonetheless an important factor in the decision.
Building a Rust Capability
Shopify is at the beginning of its Rust journey. Work remains on educational resources, internal tooling, and determining how best to participate in the Rust ecosystem. The company sees its contributions as a way to make Rust more productive not just for Shopify, but for all Rust developers. Membership in the Rust Foundation supports governance and ecosystem health, aligning with Rust’s mission to empower everyone to build sustainable, memory-safe, efficient software.
