On January 12, Open Source Security, known for its development of grsecurity, announced its sponsorship for the frontend development of the GCC compiler to support the Rust programming language — gccrs.
Originally, gccrs was developed concurrently with the original Rustc compiler, but due to the lack of specifications for the language and frequent breaking changes at an early stage, development was temporarily halted and resumed only after the release of Rust 1.0.
Open Source Security is motivated by the potential for Rust code to appear in the Linux kernel and the fact that the kernel is most often compiled with gcc. In addition, programs written in multiple languages can have vulnerabilities caused by this fact (see Exploiting Mixed Binaries), which would not exist in programs written solely in C or C++.
Currently, Open Source Security is sponsoring the work of a developer who will work on gccrs over the next year, with the possibility of funding additional staff. Additionally, the British company Embercosm, specializing in GCC and LLVM development, is involved in the process and has provided official employment arrangements for developers in this initiative.
Source: linux.org.ru
