Rust in automotive and defence · Workshop
Where Rust fits in your software, and where it does not.
An afternoon for automotive and defence teams weighing Rust against C and C++. Why the industry is moving, what the toolchain can and cannot yet do for safety-critical code, and a hands-on lab on real embedded hardware. You leave with the use cases worth piloting and what a pilot would take.
01 Why now
The industry has stopped asking whether.
In Chromium, around 70% of serious security bugs are memory-safety problems. Rust rules out most of that class at compile time, and that is what the moves below have in common.Source: Chromium (opens in a new tab)
Volvo Cars
Has shipped its first ECU written fully in Rust, on the SPA2 platform, and describes it as the first of its kind in the automotive industry.
Julius Gustavsson, Volvo Cars, at RustWeek 2025 (opens in a new tab)AUTOSAR
Since 2022, a subgroup of its functional-safety working group has worked on how Rust can be used on the Adaptive Platform, and on coding guidelines for Rust.
AUTOSAR (opens in a new tab)Eclipse S-CORE
The open core stack for software-defined vehicles, from the Eclipse SDV working group, now supports C++ and Rust side by side, with the Ferrocene safety-critical Rust toolchain integrated.
Eclipse SDV (opens in a new tab)Ferrocene
The first Rust compiler toolchain qualified by TÜV SÜD for ISO 26262 up to ASIL D. The question for safety-critical code is no longer whether a qualified compiler exists.
Ferrous Systems (opens in a new tab)US Office of the National Cyber Director
February 2024: technology manufacturers can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities by adopting memory-safe languages.
The White House, via the American Presidency Project (opens in a new tab)
02 The workshop
One afternoon, two audiences, three and a half hours.
Engineers and managers come for different things, so for most of the afternoon they get different rooms. This is the format we ran in May 2025. The tracks and the lab can be pointed at your stack.
- 0145 min
Welcome, lunch and context.
Which trends are pushing our industry towards a language like Rust? Software-defined vehicles, code bases growing by an order of magnitude, longer lifetimes, and what all three do to reuse.
- 0260 min
Two tracks, in parallel.
Business track
Why Rust matters: AUTOSAR and safety-critical integration.
Where the industry is, memory safety and the regulation around it, qualified toolchains and MISRA coverage, C-Rusted as a bridge for C-heavy teams, and what Rust does for hiring.
Technical track
Rust in practice, from desktop to embedded.
Ownership and borrowing, errors as values, async. Embassy on a Raspberry Pi Pico, Tauri for desktop tooling, and one shared crate across both.
- 0315 min
Coffee.
- 0460 min
Lab or workshop.
Lab
Hands-on: Rust in action.
Teams get a small vehicle driven by an RP2040: a network task, LEDs, a display, and a desktop GUI talking to it over TCP. Improve the software, release it, race.
Workshop
Your use cases.
Where is your stack most exposed to memory bugs? What would success with Rust look like in six to twelve months? Where would it fit: embedded ECUs, diagnostic back ends, tooling? What stands in the way?
- 0530 min
Wrap-up and next steps.
What the afternoon found, what a pilot would need, and who does what next.
03 What you leave with
Decisions, not a certificate.
- A shortlist of use cases worth piloting, in your own words, not ours.
- A map of where Rust fits in your software, and where C or C++ should stay.
- The toolchain and qualification gaps you would have to close first.
- A proposal for a pilot, if you want one. The afternoon does not depend on it.
04 What Rust does not fix
The part a sales page leaves out.
You will hear all three during the afternoon. They belong here too.
Memory safety is not correctness.
A Rust program can still panic, and a logic error compiles as happily as it does in C. Rust removes a class of bugs. Testing, reviews and verification still carry the rest.
The highest integrity levels are still maturing.
Qualified compilers exist. Coding rules at the depth MISRA gives C are still being worked out for Rust, and your assessor will ask about both.
Rewriting working code is rarely the point.
The case is strongest at the edges: new components, interfaces exposed to untrusted data, and tooling. For large C code bases, C-Rusted brings some of Rust's guarantees without a rewrite.
05 Where we come from
Embedded software that has to keep working for decades.
Diadrom has worked with diagnostics and embedded software in automotive and capital-intensive products since 1999. For FMV, the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration, we have delivered embedded development for well over a decade: in C++ and, increasingly, in Rust.
06 Book it
Tell us who would be in the room.
A few lines about the team and the software you are weighing Rust for is enough. We reply within one business day.
