UK Enterprises Face High Cost and Complexity in COBOL-to-Rust Migration

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A 2026 technical guide outlines what UK organisations must consider when migrating legacy COBOL systems to the Rust programming language. Rust is valued for its memory safety, native performance, and lack of a garbage collector, making it suitable for safety-critical and high-throughput workloads. However, the migration is technically demanding because COBOL's flat, globally accessible data model must be redesigned as owned Rust structs to satisfy the language's strict borrow checker. A mid-sized migration typically costs between £200,000 and £800,000 and takes one to two years, with additional design effort compared to managed-language alternatives like Java or C#. Developers must also handle decimal arithmetic carefully, using dedicated libraries such as rust_decimal instead of floating-point types to avoid rounding errors in financial calculations.

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