The vivo BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition: A Milestone for Rust Ecosystem Development and vivo's Strategic Layout

The vivo BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition: A Milestone for Rust Ecosystem Development and vivo's Strategic LayoutSince vivo launched its self-developed BlueRiver operating system in 2023, it has held two consecutive vivo BlueRiver OS Innovation Competitions. This competition aims to promote the popularization and development of the Rust ecosystem in China and introduce innovative forces from industry and academia to the BlueRiver OS

The vivo BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition: A Milestone for Rust Ecosystem Development and vivo's Strategic Layout

Since vivo launched its self-developed BlueRiver operating system in 2023, it has held two consecutive vivo BlueRiver OS Innovation Competitions. This competition aims to promote the popularization and development of the Rust ecosystem in China and introduce innovative forces from industry and academia to the BlueRiver OS. The second competition recently concluded, featuring fierce competition among teams from top universities including Nanjing University, Wuhan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Zhejiang University. As a peak challenge topic of the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation's competition, this year's competition focused on "Automated Solutions for Interoperability Tools between C/C++ and Rust Ecosystems," boasting the highest difficulty and a prize pool of over one million yuan, attracting over 400 teams. Several teams stood out with groundbreaking code transpilation projects, marking a milestone in C/C++ and Rust ecosystem interoperability and highlighting the competition's success.

vivo not only continuously invests in the research and development of underlying operating system technologies but also provides a high-quality platform for Rust ecosystem development and talent cultivation through the BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition. From promoting open-source communities to fostering industry chain collaboration and building a developer ecosystem, the BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition is becoming a key driver for Rust's growth in China. vivo has clearly stated its intention to continue increasing its investment, aiming to make the BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition the most influential and valuable Rust competition in the industry.

What are vivo's strategic considerations for heavily investing in the Rust ecosystem? While other manufacturers are still observing the risks involved in system-level innovation, why has vivo chosen this path? This has sparked widespread industry attention.

The growth rate of China's smartphone penetration rate has far exceeded expectations, reaching 85% in 2023 (source: Zhongtai Securities Research Institute). The prevalence of smart devices presents new challenges, with security, efficiency, and concurrency becoming key factors influencing the direction of operating system development. Rust, as an emerging system-level programming language, is attracting significant attention due to its memory safety, concurrency safety, and high performance, and is rapidly gaining popularity worldwide.

Compared to traditional C/C++ programming languages, Rust employs a strict ownership management mechanism, effectively preventing memory leaks and buffer overflows, significantly reducing system-level security risks. Therefore, Rust is considered one of the best candidate languages for next-generation operating systems and underlying software development.

Tech giants such as Microsoft and Google are also increasing their investment in the Rust ecosystem. Microsoft has rewritten some key modules of the Windows kernel using 36,000 lines of Rust code to mitigate memory safety issues stemming from C/C++ code. After investing $1 million in the Rust Foundation, Google also began using Rust to rewrite some underlying modules in core components of the Android system. According to Google's data, 21% of the new native code in Android 13 is written in Rust, and the amount of Rust code in AOSP has reached 1.5 million lines, covering all aspects of the Android system. These trends indicate that Rust's influence is rapidly expanding.

The explosion of AI and other technologies is also driving smart systems into a new round of competition. Although Rust is still under development, it has the potential to become a key factor in enabling China to overtake its competitors in the operating system field. The accelerated implementation of applications such as autonomous driving, mobile payments, remote personalized healthcare, and smart homes means that smart terminals cover every aspect of our lives. The operating system of smart terminals carries all applications; even an insignificant security vulnerability could lead to unpredictable harm, making security the most critical issue.

vivo chose to conduct full-stack self-research from the underlying operating system layer and use Rust to build the BlueRiver OS, addressing memory safety issues from the source. The BlueRiver OS has become the "industry's first full-stack operating system written in Rust," demonstrating vivo's commitment to security.

However, Rust, as a relatively young language, also faces numerous challenges. Its steep learning curve and still-developing ecosystem tools make learning and development more difficult, resulting in a relative shortage of Rust developers. These issues make many companies hesitant to fully embrace Rust.

To address Rust's ecosystem issues, vivo adopted a "many hands make light work" strategy, which is the core concept behind the BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition. Launched in September 2024, the second competition focused on "Automated Solutions for Interoperability Tools between C/C++ and Rust Ecosystems," aiming to lower the barrier to entry for Rust ecosystem migration and enable automatic code transpilation. By collaborating with industry and academia, innovative solutions are explored, enabling developers to efficiently migrate between C/C++ and Rust, significantly reducing development costs.

vivo has chosen to overcome these challenges. While developing BlueRiver OS into a milestone project for the Rust ecosystem, it actively promotes the openness of the Rust ecosystem and engages in close cooperation with industry and academia. By partnering with the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation to host the BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition, vivo has attracted the participation of numerous universities and research institutions and encouraged more industry partners to pay attention to the progress of the Rust ecosystem.

In the finals, the CodeCompassTeam won first place and a 300,000 yuan prize for its efficient and versatile automated transpilation tool. Multiple teams received second and third prizes. Some winning projects successfully upgraded fragment-level code transpilation between C/C++ and Rust to file-level transpilation and have begun to demonstrate project-level transpilation capabilitiesa milestone achievement for the Rust ecosystem.

This achievement not only contributes to the growth of vivo's self-developed BlueRiver OS but also provides guidance and assistance to more developers and enterprises, accelerating the adoption of Rust. The BlueRiver OS Innovation Competition has become an important indicator of trends in the Rust field, attracting more and more developers to focus on and invest in Rust.

Besides expanding its influence through competitions, vivo is also happy to share its research results on Rust. At the 2024 VDC launch event, Zhou Wei, vivo's Vice President, Vice President of OS Products, and Dean of vivo AI Global Research Institute, announced that vivo would open-source the BlueRiver real-time kernel written in Rust, providing domestic developers with a more complete and valuable Rust project and setting a high-quality example for future Rust system development.

vivo is promoting the growth of domestically produced operating systems with an open attitude and is actively building an open and sustainable Rust ecosystem through practical actions, providing safer, more efficient, and more intelligent technical support for domestic systems.

The vivo BlueRiver OS has taken the lead in entering the era of full-stack self-research using Rust, leading the industry in the practical application of Rust and showcasing the future direction of domestically produced operating systemsinherently smarter, safer, and smoother.

"Inherently smarter" is reflected in the fact that the BlueRiver OS integrates AI functions into its core modules, deeply integrating large language models to make the system not just a tool, but an intelligent "partner." It uses an LLM-driven multimodal interaction mode to improve natural language understanding and visual perception capabilities. Its intelligent interactive interface is highly adaptable and can be flexibly applied to different product forms. For example, on a smartwatch, the BlueHeart XiaoV voice assistant provides personalized vertical question-and-answer services, local skills, and health encyclopedia knowledge, while the AI sports coach provides private coaching-level exercise experiences, and the AI dial editor allows users to customize watch faces.

System smoothness is equally critical. The high-performance system architecture of the BlueRiver OS can flexibly tailor system functions based on device performance and usage needs, ensuring smooth operation on different devices.

Security is the cornerstone of long-term stable system operation. Based on the analysis of existing operating system security vulnerabilities, vivo chose to develop the BlueRiver OS using Rust to fundamentally solve the memory safety issues caused by C/C++ languages, providing a higher standard of protection for data privacy and system security.

The vivo BlueRiver OS, with Rust as its foundation and vivo's long-term technological accumulation as its framework, has built a new benchmark for operating systems that integrates "intelligence, security, and smoothness."

Faced with the realities of Rust's steep learning curve, scarcity of developers, and weak ecosystem tools, vivo has chosen to use competitions as a lever to promote collaborative innovation in industry, academia, and research. The themes of the two competitions have evolved continuously, and the deep integration of industry, academia, and research has accelerated the popularization and implementation of the Rust ecosystem in China. By open-sourcing the BlueRiver kernel, vivo has also set an example for Rust system development in the industry.

Only operating systems built on independent technology can take root and grow. When more developers and enterprises join in and work together on the development of operating system ecosystems, China's intelligent industry will have more say in future competition.