systemd introduces official support for Rust development

The systemd project has officially integrated support for the Rust programming language, allowing for the development of new, standalone components. This decision follows a pull request from Linux kernel developer Christian Brauner and has been merged into the project’s main branch.

To maintain stability, the project is adopting a limited approach: Rust will only be used for new components that do not have dependencies on existing parts of systemd. The existing C-based architecture will remain untouched. Furthermore, the project will continue to use Meson for its build process rather than adopting Cargo, ensuring integration with current infrastructure.

New Rust components will utilize a ‘no_std’ approach, meaning they will not rely on the Rust standard library or external third-party crates. Instead, they will interact with systemd’s C libraries through generated bindings. The project also provides its own Rust implementations for common container types to manage memory explicitly. The first planned application for this new support is the security certificate management system, systemd-keyring-setup.