Why software is converging on Rust in the age of AI

For about a decade, "rewrite it in Rust" was a joke. It was what an excitable stranger posted under every bug report in a C++ project, and the reply was some polite version of no, because rewrites took years and broke things that already worked. Dropbox spent years moving its sync engine from Python to Rust, and its own write-up warns that in many companies it would have been a terrible idea. Over a few months in 2026, one large project after another did it anyway, and none of them took years.