FreeBSD Considers Making Use Of Rust Within Its Base System

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 22 January 2024 at 10:05 AM EST. 58 Comments
BSD
FreeBSD developers are currently weighing the benefits and costs of allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the FreeBSD base system.

The main downside of including Rust within the FreeBSD base system is basically a doubling of build times. Due to then needing to compile the LLVM-based Rustc compiler and all the extras there for Rust, they would find the base system build times to roughly double over the status quo. There is though some options being expressed by developers to working around those build time issues.

FreeBSD installer


By allowing Rust code into base, they could (re)write various components into this programming language such as the ZFS daemon (zfsd) rather than being in C++, a rewrite of devd, WiFi user-space code could benefit from being written in Rust, and more.

The discussion over allowing Rust within FreeBSD base is still ongoing, but for those interested in the prospects of using the Rust programming language within the base FreeBSD system itself can be found via this mailing list thread.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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