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Firebloom is more of a custom compiler/toolchain than a dialect of C—apart from annotations to relate pointer+length parameters, etc., it is still just C.

Reminds me of this blurb from djb's qmail security guarantee [0]:

> I've mostly given up on the standard C library. Many of its facilities, particularly stdio, seem designed to encourage bugs. A big chunk of qmail is stolen from a basic C library that I've been developing for several years for a variety of applications. The stralloc concept and getln() make it very easy to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks, and artificial line length limits.

[0]: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html

I mean, the annotations are supposed to be simple C attributes wrapped in macros, so even them are just C

The other commenter mentioning Firebloom is correct that some firmware (iBoot family) has been using C w/ Firebloom extensions for a while. Parts of SEPOS also use Swift, which would make more sense as a non-C language than Rust, from Apple's perspective at least.

What benefit would Apple get from this? They want you all in on an ecosystem they control.

EDIT: Thought OP was talking about writing iOS apps using Rust.

Apple does use Rust, though from job postings, we can infer it's more like network services than firmware.

Regardless though, I don't see how the implementation language of your firmware is locking you into a specific ecosystem, so this criticism seems misguided to me.

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