2025-08-29 –, Room 1 (Main Room)
Learn why Adobe is moving beyond C++ by integrating Rust to build better products faster and more securely. Explore our pragmatic migration strategy for a 78M line codebase, emphasizing incremental adoption and developer enablement over a risky rewrite. Gain insights into Adobe's journey towards a modern, safer, and more productive software development future.
For decades, C++ has powered Adobe's iconic software. Yet, the future demands evolution. This talk explores why Adobe is embarking on a strategic journey to integrate Rust, aiming to fundamentally enhance how we build software. Our primary driver is simple: putting the best tools in our engineers' hands yields the best products for our customers. We believe Rust offers a transformative jump in productivity, ergonomics, packaging, and overall software engineering effectiveness that eclipses standard C++ upgrades. We'll also touch upon the clear industry momentum behind Rust for staffing and the undeniable need for memory-safe languages to protect our users – a commitment we make because it's right, not just because of regulations.
Transitioning a 78M line codebase requires a smart strategy, not a rewrite. We'll detail our pragmatic goal of reducing new C++ reliance significantly by 2030. Learn how pilot projects paved the way, proving Rust's production-readiness. Our core tactic is minimizing friction: making Rust easy to adopt via build systems, training, and community support, mirroring Rust's own success strategy. While we're still early in this journey and actively working with the Rust Foundation and partners on improving interop, join us to understand Adobe's vision for a more productive, secure, and forward-looking engineering future powered by strategic language evolution.
David Sankel is a Principal Scientist leading Adobe's Software Technology Lab and is an active member of the C++ Standardization Committee. His experience spans microservice architectures, CAD/CAM, computer graphics, visual programming languages, web applications, computer vision, and cryptography. He is a frequent speaker at C++ conferences and specializes in large-scale software engineering and advanced C++ topics. David’s interests include dependently typed languages, semantic domains, EDSLs, and functional reactive programming. He was the project editor of the C++ Reflection TS, is the Executive Director of the Boost Foundation, and authored several C++ proposals including pattern matching and language variants.