Meta is rewriting its mobile messaging infrastructure from C to Rust to address maintainability issues and improve developer experience. The legacy C codebase had become difficult to work with, featuring long functions and manual memory management that led to production bugs. Rust's compile-time ownership checks eliminate memory safety issues while providing better tooling, cleaner code semantics, and faster developer feedback. Despite Rust's learning curve, Meta's team successfully onboarded engineers through mentoring and leveraged internal working groups for support. The migration prioritizes developer velocity and confidence over raw performance, with improved debugging capabilities and safer refactoring as key benefits.
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