We’re excited to be part of the Rust Foundation’s new Safety-Critical Rust Consortium. The primary objective of this group will be to support the responsible use of the Rust programming language in safety-critical software — systems whose failure can impact human life or cause severe environmental or property harm.
“Ferrous Systems has been leading the discussion about safety-critical Rust since 2019 and was the first to offer a qualified Rust compiler, Ferrocene, in 2023,” says Florian. “We are thrilled that the topic is being recognized by the Rust Foundation, and we look forward to working with fellow consortium members to make Rust a first-class language for embedded systems at the highest security levels.”
Safety-Critical Rust Consortium Membership is open to Rust Foundation member organizations and other invitees, such as industry, academic, and legal experts.
Work under the consortium will begin with the creation of a public charter and goals, and meeting minutes will be published on an ongoing basis. The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium will liaise with the Rust Project through Rust Foundation Project Directors and members of Rust Project teams. The Consortium’s scope, which will be fully delineated in the charter, may include the development of guidelines, linters, libraries, static analysis tools, formal methods and language subsets to meet industrial and legal requirements. The Consortium’s deliverables will be developed and licensed compatible with other Rust Project endeavors.
The group may further shepherd Rust Foundation-funded implementation work, including grants to existing academic teams or FOSS projects. Any Rust Foundation-funded work will be submitted upstream, licensed as FOSS, and any specifications will be freely available. The group will further attempt to coordinate with and expand on existing safety-critical projects and standards including SAE JA1020.
To learn more, visit the Rust Foundation website.
Ferrocene is the first open-source qualified Rust compiler toolchain for safety- and mission-critical applications. It is qualified for automotive (ISO 26262, ASIL-D) and industrial development (IEC 61508, SIL4) with more coming soon. The latest release, Ferrocene 24.05, is currently qualified for use on x86-64 Linux, targeting 64-bit Arm platforms. Support for 32-bit Arm, RISC-V and WASM targets, as well as Windows and macOS host machines, is currently available in early-access for non-qualified use cases. The source code of Ferrocene is fully open source under the MIT OR Apache-2.0 license, including the full qualification documents and can be found at https://ferrocene.dev/. Ferrocene licenses are conscientiously priced and available to both individuals and enterprises.
