Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency.
Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but can guarantee memory safety without garbage collection. Rust has been called a systems programming language, and in addition to high-level features such as functional programming it also offers mechanisms for low-level memory management.
First appearing in 2010, Rust designers refined the language while writing the Firefox browser engine. It has gained popularity and investment from the industry, including Amazon, Discord, Dropbox, Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft.
Repeatedly, Rust has been voted the "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
As Rust is built by its community, each major decision in Rust starts as a Request for Comments (RFC). Everyone is invited to discuss the proposal, to work toward a shared understanding of the tradeoffs. Though sometimes arduous, this community deliberation is Rust’s secret sauce for quality. Therefore, it is important to bridge among communities. The future contact person on AUTOSAR side is a lucky catch for this task.
Christof Petig, well known in the Rust community, has agreed to take over the responsibility for the content to be created. He has 25 years of C++ experience and has become a Rust enthusiast in the meantime. “The code written in Rust is checked to be memory safe and free from data races. At the same time, since all possible checks are checked at compile time, there is negligible runtime overhead. This means that the performance of Rust is comparable to C++”, Christof summarizes during the initial talks. As other standardization bodies such as Khronos or SAE in the automotive field are in line with such assessment, the Embedded Software focus is to combine efforts for efficient standardization.
All this is not new to the AUTOSAR development partnership and its community. Experienced in ramp up of C++14 Coding Guidelines AUTOSAR wants to keep alive its tradition of innovation and being a standardization body highly valuing Functional Safety and Automotive Cybersecurity. The decision to form a subgroup within the Working Group for Functional Safety (WG-SAF) is a consequence. The subgroup will officially get started on April 2022 and plans to produce two documents. One of the documents will be providing guidance on how Rust can be utilized in the context of AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform projects. The other document will propose Coding Guidelines on Rust.