Overview
The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium is a working group hosted under the Rust Foundation that coordinates the work needed to make Rust a viable language for software in safety-critical domains — avionics, automotive, medical devices, industrial control, rail — where code must meet standards such as DO-178C, ISO 26262, IEC 62304, and IEC 61508. Rust’s memory- and thread-safety guarantees are a strong starting point for these domains, but adoption requires a coordinated effort around toolchain qualification, coding guidelines, and a clear story about which language features are safe to use in which contexts. The consortium brings together the organizations doing that work in one place.
Membership spans automotive, aerospace OEMs and tooling vendors with active interest in qualified Rust toolchains and safety-critical Rust adoption — including AdaCore, Arm, AUTOSAR, Bosch, Ferrous Systems, HighTec, Lynx, NVIDIA, OxidOS, TECHFUND, TrustInSoft, Veecle, Volvo Cars, and Woven by Toyota, among others, alongside individual contributors from across the Rust community.
The Coding Guidelines Subcommittee is the working group inside the consortium responsible for producing a coherent set of coding guidelines for Rust in safety-critical contexts — analogous to what MISRA C and MISRA C++ provide for those languages. The subcommittee’s deliverables are guidelines for Rust constructs that may be unsuitable or that need restricted use in safety-critical software, written with traceability to the language reference and a clear rationale tied to the failure modes the guideline is meant to prevent. The work is conducted publicly and feeds back into the broader Rust ecosystem; output is intended to be referenceable by certification authorities and tool qualification efforts.
I joined the subcommittee as a member in June 2026.
Contributions
- More coming soon!