from Hacker News

Industry forms consortium to drive adoption of Rust in safety-critical systems

by xrayarx on 6/14/24, 5:18 AM with 7 comments

• by pyeri on 6/14/24, 5:27 AM

  This is great news for the progress of rust language. As someone recently said on a subreddit, rust's real power is that it fills that remarkable empty sweet spot between the low-level, high performance (but memory unsafe) languages like C/C++ AND the high-level, low performance (but memory safe) languages like Python and Java. The scope here is tremendous provided the folks can cater to it and nurture an ecosystem of apps, libraries, frameworks, etc.

• by hi-v-rocknroll on 6/14/24, 10:40 AM

  Good to see. Formal verification tools need to happen, and I hope they will be generalized to user-space, kernel, and embedded purposes. If FOSS, this would be amazing, but I suspect most of it will remain extremely expensive and shut out individual developers from the space.

• by westurner on 6/14/24, 1:26 PM

  > The consortium aims to develop guidelines, tools, libraries, and language subsets to meet industrial and legal requirements for safety-critical systems.

  > Moreover, the initiative seeks to incorporate lessons learned from years of development in the open source ecosystem to make Rust a valuable component of safety toolkits across various industries and severity levels

  Resources and opportunities for a safety critical Rust initiative:

  - "The First Rust-Written Network PHY Driver Set to Land in Linux 6.8" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677600

  - awesome-safety-critical > Software safety standards: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#so...

  - rust smart pointers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563857 ; LLVM signed pointers for pointer authentication: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307180

  From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563857 :

  > - Secure Rust Guidelines > Memory management, > Checklist > Memory management: https://anssi-fr.github.io/rust-guide/05_memory.html

  Rust OS projects to safety critical with the forthcoming new guidelines: Redox, Cosmic, MotorOS, Maestro, Aerugo

  - "MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907876: "Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38852360#38857185 ; redox-os, cosmic-de , Motūrus OS; MotorOS

  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861799 : > COSMIC DE (Rust-based) supports rust-windowing/winit apps, which compile to a <canvas> tag in WASM.

  > winit: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

  - "Aerugo – RTOS for aerospace uses written in Rust" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39245897

  - "The Rust Implementation of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34743393

  From a previous Ctrl-F rust,; "Rust in the Linux kernel" (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35783214 :

  - > Is this the source for the rust port of the Android binder kernel module?: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/...

  > This guide with unsafe rust that calls into the C, and then with next gen much safer rust right next to it would be a helpful resource too.

  From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34744433 ... From "Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709239 :

  >>>>> Which universities teach formal methods?

  /?hnlog "TLA" and "side channel"