Industry forms consortium to drive adoption of Rust in safety-critical systems | Hacker News Reader

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

thenewstack.io

30 pointsxrayarx7 comments

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.

Rust is also one of the few "high productivity low level" languages like C++ or Ada or (with reservations because it has GC) OCaml.

I would add Delphi, Modula-2 to the list, in terms of features, not how they turned up in the market in 2024.

Tongue in check comment... as I am learning Rust for fun, mid-career, "high productivity" is not what I'd call the language. I like it, but I am half as fast as other similar languages to get the same results.

Jokes aside. I'd like to see a comparison of Rust vs. modern Ada.

I haven't touched Ada since college (i.e. in decades), but it has many nice features that C++ lacks. It's a pity that it isn't used outside specific circles.

I think Rust only really shines when you factor in the longer-term lifetime (pun unintended) of the code. If you’re just focused on how much time it takes to get something working — in other words, a PoC / MVP — it doesn’t seem surprising to me that it’s significantly slower.

The promise to me lies in the entire classes of errors you systemically prevent from happening (given no unsafe code) and just generally how much easier it is to write maintainable and bug-free code.

These mechanisms are part of a very broad set of tooling that slows you down short-term but pays off in huge quantities over any even medium-term timeframe in an actual business product intended to be long-living.

Granted, Rust has its tradeoffs just like any other language — from what I hear, refactoring and fighting the compiler in certain domains like gamedev gets annoying — but it seems much more positive than negative.

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.

> 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"

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