Ferrocene Safety-Critical Rust Compiler Code Published

Ferrous Systems has made available open-source code for Ferrocene, their Rust compiler focused on safety-critical and mission-critical environments. The Ferrocene compiler is being made available under Apache 2.0 or MIT licensing.

The Ferrocene Rust compiler is qualified for use within automotive and industrial environments, having received various ISO and IEC certifications. Ferrous Systems has upstreamed already various quality improvements to the upstream Rust compiler itself while now is making their downstream compiler available as open-source under Apache 2.0 or MIT licensing.

But Ferrous Systems won't be accepting community contributions and the production-grade, pre-built binaries will only be sold commercially:

"Finally, despite Ferrocene being open source, if you want pre-built binaries that are validated and given long-term support by Rust experts, that comes at a cost. This cost covers particularly long term support over what the Rust project guarantees, the safety of our build infrastructure and the support that we give over it, up to certification support. But even on lower tiers, Ferrous Systems will actively inform you of issues found in older versions of the shipped compilers and support the Rust project in fixing issues in upcoming ones.

Ferrocene will be available for purchase by individuals and companies later this year at €25 per month per seat (or €240 per seat if paying annually). Purchasing Ferrocene will grant you access to the pre-built binaries and packages of our qualified compilers, and the rendered qualification documents for all versions of Ferrocene."

The Ferrocene Rust compiler source code is available via GitHub. More details on the open-source release of this safety-critical compiler via the Ferrous Systems blog.

Separately, Rust 1.73 was released today as the newest upstream Rust compiler release. Rust 1.73 brings cleaner panic messages, thread local initialization improvements, newly stabilized APIs, and other changes.