Welcome to another Rust Foundation Member Spotlight blog! This series aims to introduce our community to various Rust Foundation Member organizations and their leaders.
In this installment, we are featuring new Rust Foundation Silver Member, AdaCore, and sharing a Q&A with their Chief Product Officer, Quentin Ochem who oversees product management, marketing, and research.
Tell us about AdaCore. What do you do and who do you serve? #
AdaCore supports software development needs for high-integrity embedded industries. In particular, we provide a development environment for various programming languages, Ada, C, C++, and now Rust. Tools that we make available to our customers include compilers, testing, source coverage, static analysis, and formal proof.
How is AdaCore using Rust? #
AdaCore is providing a Rust toolchain (Ferrocene, with Ferrous Systems) aimed at industrial users that have either long-term stability needs or safety certification needs. In particular, we have the ability to support a toolchain over years and decades of life cycles of industrial products. We’re working on providing safety certification evidence against various standards, including ISO-26262 (automotive) and DO-178 (avionics).
Why did AdaCore decide to join the Rust Foundation? #
AdaCore's goal from the outset has been to provide software development and verification tools for the most demanding applications. With our long and successful track record in embedded systems and safety certification, we see Rust as a perfect match for our mission and our expertise with high-integrity languages. We are very happy to join the Rust Foundation, and we look forward to serving the Rust community.
What are your hopes for the future of Rust? #
I’m hoping that Rust reaches a stage where it can be considered one of the default off-the-shelf choices for high-integrity development. I would like to see a world where this could make memory issues a thing of the past – at least for critical software.
What is your personal favorite thing about Rust? #
The short answer is the borrow-checker. It provides a demonstration that pointer safety and efficiency aren’t antinomic, and should provide a blueprint for other programming languages to adopt it as one of the standard paradigms that all should support.
Now, beyond the sheer merits of the language, Rust is also acting as a fascinating forcing function to raise the bar in terms of what is acceptable or not from a software engineering standpoint. Rust demonstrates that changing some of the fundamental building blocks of the development process is an efficient alternative to offsetting foundational weaknesses by external tooling. I think that’s amazing.
Thank you to AdaCore for their Rust Foundation Silver-level membership!
You can learn more about AdaCore via their website and connect with them on GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn.