systemd With Its Initial Support For Rust

Systemd recently merged support for Rust programs. This initial systemd Rust support is limited to leaf components / individual binaries while eventually they hope to be able to support Rust within root components of systemd. More details on this initiative were shared this week. Systemd lead developers Christian Brauner and Lennart Poettering who recently started the Amutable company for delivering verifiable integrity to Linux workloads wrote a blog post on Tuesday to outline this initial Rust support within systemd. They are currently not able to support Rust code in systemd core components until there is first-class shared library support in Rust. But for now the systemd project can allow Rust within systemd binaries as leaf components due to the shared code remaining C-only. Among the key design decisions for Rust being permitted in systemd include uniform access to core APIs, uniform behavior, uniform build system, no-std Rust, Rust remaining optional, and similar design requirements. Lennart and Christian ended the blog post with: "systemd would also like to see Rust adopted in core components and is willing to engage with the Rust community to make this a reality. The hope is that adopting Rust, even if only in leaf binaries for now, sends another strong signal to the Rust community that core components of the Linux stack are adopting Rust. It would be nice if fundamental blockers such as the lack of first-class support for shared libraries or the ability to interact with the file system primarily through file descriptors were addressed." Those wishing to learn more about Rust in systemd can do so via the Amutable blog.