Johannes Foufas, a software engineer at Volvo Cars, is the company’s technologist and system architect (also its embedded Rust pioneer1) Julius Gustavsson conducted an interview discussing the use of Rust in automobiles.

Gustavsson revealed that he discovered Rust in 2014 when he had been working on C/C++ for 15 years and was questioning his own career;Members of new team at major Swedish tech firm. After jumping to Volvo a few years later, he increasingly sees Rust as a language useful to Volvo Cars “because it embodies the same type of ideology you want when developing safety-critical software”.

Left Julius Gustavssonpicture right Johannes Foufas

Gustavsson’s first project at Volvo was Android integration with Signal Broker (now BeamyBroker) on its Core Computer prototype. This is a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for the broker, itself written in Elixir; but it uses Rust and async Futures to accomplish the task. “It’s also a big confirmation that this is really useful stuff. Everything works from the start.”

Afterwards, he and theThe equally aspiring Nikolaos Korkakakis teamed up to bring Rust to the Low Power node of Volvo’s core computer.According to Gustavsson, the main advantages of Rust include:Don’t worry about race conditions and memory corruption, and general memory safety. “You know, it’s possible to write correct and robust code from the start.So this is basically my first impressionbut now I’m starting to realize that there are many other advantages as well.”

Looking ahead, Gustavsson said theywith very ambitious plans,“We want to expand Rust at Volvo Cars to enable it on more nodes, and for that we need to get compiler support for some hardware targets and OS support for others. Replacing the already developed and well-tested no meaningful code,But code developed from scratch should definitely be written in Rust if it works“.

but Gustavsson also pointed out that,Rust Not everything, the language is not always optimal. Overall, he sees a huge potential for Rust to produce higher quality code at a lower cost, which in turn reduces warranty costs and is a win-win.

Additionally, Gustavsson points out that new Rust code can work with existing C and C++ in “Almost any granularity, module level, or function level“Coexistence; mostly depends on what you’re doing, e.g.”Can rewrite parts that require network security, parts that are vulnerable“.

Volvo isn’t the only automaker interested in Rust. Autosar (an automotive standards organization whose members include Ford, GM, BMW, Bosch, Volkswagen, Toyota, Volvo and more) announced in AprilFormed a Rust working group. SAE International has also formed a working group to study Rust safety-related systems for the automotive industry.

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