Experimenting Is Underway For Rust Code Within Mesa

Longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst who has worked extensively on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as well as the OpenCL/compute stack while being employed by Red Hat is now toying with the idea of Rust code inside Mesa.

Karol Herbst has begun investigating how Rust code, which is known for its memory safety and concurrency benefits, could be used within Mesa. Ultimately he's evaluating how Rust could be used inside Mesa as an API implementation as well as for leveraging existing Mesa code by Rust.

The initial experimenting has been around "Rusticl" for Rust code leveraging Mesa's OpenCL/Clover code. Rust-bindgen is used for generating the Mesa and OpenCL bindings.

There are various issues raised for the prospects of Rust code in Mesa at this point, but for those interested see this slide deck and Karol's Rust in Mesa presentation embedded below.