In medical development projects, you often face a familiar challenge: how do you efficiently build fast and efficient software, while being highly reliable to meet the stringent safety requirements for medical devices.
Rust has proven to be the language that meets that responsibility. It is a modern language that enables us to build safer, more reliable, and more future‑proof products for our clients. To explore why, we spoke with Bohdan, Technical/ Rust specialist at TOPIC Embedded Systems.
Rust in simple terms
Rust is designed to prevent the most common, and most dangerous, software problems before they lead to real-world failures. Memory-related issues like buffer overflows, data races, use-after-free, unexpected “null” values” but also overflowing numbers account for many crashes and unpredictable behaviors. It enforces clean code, provides strong safety checks by default, and offers an ecosystem that keeps our work secure and maintainable.
Bohdan: “Where most languages allow these mistakes to slip through until runtime, Rust is designed to do the opposite: it catches them automatically at compile time. For medical and safety-critical systems, this built-in safety net is highly valuable. On top of that, it’s simply fun to learn.”
A rapidly maturing ecosystem
The Rust ecosystem has matured quickly. Its adoption in cloud environments such as AWS and Google Cloud continues to grow, alongside an accelerating shift toward embedded devices. This enables us to build consistent end-to-end solutions across multiple domains.
Bohdan: "Tools like Wokwi make hardware development more transparent and testable, even without physical boards. And thanks to the embedded Rust community’s work on common interfaces, drivers and application logic are now far more portable across device families.”
Rust beyond “normal” software
Rust’s strengths extend well beyond traditional software applications. In one of our recent medical projects, we deployed it on an embedded system, a domain where reliability and resource control are essential.
Bohdan: "For this particular project in the field of organ preservation, we implemented valve control, pressure sensor readings, and UI output via a textual dotmatrix display, writing our own drivers for each. We also used Rust’s async/await syntax to boost performance. Importantly, the overall development effort for this project was reduced by using Rust."
Choosing the right language for each project
While Rust is one of our preferred languages for embedded and safety-critical software, we always choose the technology in close consultation with the customer to ensure the best fit with their needs. Depending on the project, that can also mean using C++, C, Python or C#.
Rust as a strategic decision
Rust is ultimately a strategic investment. It helps us deliver software with higher reliability, reduces unexpected failures, and strengthens security by catching issues early in the development process. And because many problems are resolved before production, long‑term maintenance becomes more predictable and cost‑effective. With its growing adoption across medical, automotive, and embedded domains, Rust offers a solid foundation for products that need to last.
Bohdan: “By adopting a language built on safety and sustainability, we reduce risk, speed up development, and ensure the solutions we build today stay secure for tomorrow.” (Scaled Agile Framework) helps organizations apply Agile principles when multiple teams, often from various disciplines and expertise, work on the same product or service. It brings structure, predictability, and transparency so teams can deliver value faster and keep improving. For companies with complex products and many dependencies, SAFe is essential for staying in control of planning and quality.
