http://blog.maidsafe.net/2015/07/01/the-ants-are-coming/ "Soon after, heavily frustrated by the speed at which we were developing in C++, we started looking into ways to speed up development without a reduction in code quality, surely the holy grail of software development. After much research, David became increasingly convinced that a new systems-level language, Rust, had something to offer. In his spare time (between about 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.) he started transposing one of our most complex libraries, Self-Encryption (the component that seamlessly splits data into smaller chunks and encrypts them), over to Rust, which at that time wasn’t even in Beta yet. This was very successful and fast! David followed a similar process with MaidSafe’s Routing library. With another successful test complete our development team was split for a few weeks while the core team remained in C++ and another team started transposing the rest of the code. This was a risky and scary time. To split the dev team at a period when we were under significant pressure to produce a stable network seemed counterintuitive. But thankfully, going backwards to move forward paid off, and without this change there is no doubt in our minds that we would not be where we are today. It is not the intention to go into detail here about how and whether Rust is better than C++. For debates on that subject you can check out some of the threads on the forum and elsewhere. I think that is a debate as contentious as GPL vs MIT, or even Borg vs MacEnroe, fun to debate but don’t expect consensus any time soon. All I can say is that it’s working for us and allows us to iterate quickly, be more defined with our tasks and be more definitive with our timescales."