RustConf 2025 Interview: Pete LeVasseur, Lead, Safety-Critical Rust Consortium

At RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Tyler Mandry, co-lead of the Rust Language Team, sits down on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team with Pete LeVasseur, lead of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, to ask: what does safety critical actually mean, and where does Rust fit? Pete shares the path from mainframe assembly ambitions to a decade in automated driving and ADAS in Metro Detroit, a six-month Haskell side quest, and finding in Rust the answer to the C and C++ defects he kept catching (and worrying about missing) in code review. Topics include: • What makes software safety critical: potential impact on human life, health, environment, or property, and the regulations that follow from that • ISO 26262 and the ASIL levels from QM through D, illustrated from infotainment to camera perception to the brake controller • Safety-qualified toolchains, coding guidelines, and why "subset the language" is literally written into the standard • Macros in safety critical: escaping the reputation of C macros, and guidelines that offer alternatives instead of just prohibitions • Where C still wins: exotic ultra-cheap microcontrollers with strange integer widths, glued into cases • The FLS, "the specification formerly known as the Ferrocene Language Specification": moving to updates every stable release, and what a fuller specification could unlock for multiple compiler implementations like gccrs • MISRA's recategorization finding that roughly half of MISRA C is simply disapplied by Rust's language guarantees • MC/DC coverage and the open design questions of applying it to constructs like match • The consortium today: around 150 members from Infineon to Airbus to Volvo Cars, three subcommittees (Coding Guidelines, Liaison, Tooling), and how joining is as simple as a GitHub issue Links mentioned: Safety-Critical Rust Consortium: https://github.com/rustfoundation/safety-critical-rust-consortium Safety-Critical Rust Coding Guidelines: https://github.com/rustfoundation/safety-critical-rust-coding-guidelines The FLS: https://github.com/rust-lang/fls MISRA: https://misra.org.uk/ Ferrocene: https://ferrocene.dev/ gccrs: https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs Eclipse uProtocol: https://github.com/eclipse-uprotocol PyO3: https://pyo3.rs/ Pete on GitHub: https://github.com/PLeVasseur Pete's blog: https://petelevasseur.com/ Interview conducted by Tyler Mandry on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team.