Rust is everywhere, and it’s no surprise it’s also made its way into the lowest levels of certain operating systems and kernels, so it shouldn’t be surprising that various operating system developers have to field questions and inquiries about Rust. NetBSD developer Benny Siegert wrote a blog post about this very subject, and in it, details why it’s unlikely Rust will find its way into the NetBSD base system and/or the kernel
First, NetBSD is famed for its wide architecture and platform support, and Rust would make that a lot more troublesome due to Rust simply not being available on many platforms NetBSD supports. Rust release cycles also aren’t compatible with NetBSD, it would draw a lot of dependency code into the base system, and keeping Rust and its compiler toolchain working is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of a relatively small group of NetBSD developers.
Note that while NetBSD does tend to take a more cautious approach to these matters than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, the operating system isn’t averse to change on principle. For instance, not only is Lua part of the base system, it’s even used in the NetBSD kernel due to its ability to rapidly develop and prototype kernel drivers. In short, while it doesn’t seem likely Rust will make it into the NetBSD base system, it’s not an impossibility either.
