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Can Rust Work for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems?

March 18, 2025

Ferrous Systems’s Florian Gilcher talks about the Rust programming language and safe software.

What you’ll learn:

Why Rust is important for embedded programmers.
How Rust helps in building safe and secure applications.

Rust is a relatively new programming language that has garnered support from developers working on everything from Linux device drivers to cloud services. It’s designed to be memory- and thread-safe. Rust pointer management is one factor that makes the language stand out.

As an open-source project, it can’t be used directly in many applications, where standards like IEC 62304 and ISO 26262 are required. It needs a version that meets these requirements, which is where Ferrous Systems's Ferrocene comes into play.

In this episode of Inside Electronics, I talk with Ferrous Systems’s Florian Gilcher about Rust, Ferrocene, and how the compiler toolchain brings Rust into the world of rugged and embedded systems.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.