Safety-Critical Rust Coding Guidelines

Coding Guidelines for Safety Critical Rust developed by the Safety Critical Rust Consortium.

Note: Early, subject to changes.

Building the coding guidelines

The Safety-Critical Rust Coding Guidelines use Sphinx and Sphinx-Needs to build a rendered version of the coding guidelines, and uv to install and manage Python dependencies (including Sphinx itself). To simplify building the rendered version, we created a script called make.py that takes care of invoking Sphinx with the right flags.

You can build the rendered version by running:

   ./make.py

By default, Sphinx uses incremental rebuilds to generate the content that changed since the last invocation. If you notice a problem with incremental rebuilds, you can pass the -c flag to clear the existing artifacts before building:

   ./make.py -c

The rendered version will be available in build/html/.

A machine-parseable artifact will be available at build/html/needs.json. (ToDo: Pete LeVasseur) The needs.json file could use some cleaning up and some description here of the contents.

A record with checksums of the contents is available at build/html/guidelines-ids.json. Users of the coding guidelines can reference this file to determine if there have been changes to coding guidelines contents they should be aware of.

Contributing to the coding guidelines

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Chapter layout mirrors Ferrocene Language Specification

We have the same chapter layout as the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS). If you would like to contribute you may find a section from the FLS of interest and then write a guideline in the corresponding chapter of these coding guidelines.

Guideline template

We have a script ./generate-guideline-templates.py which which assumes you're using uv that can be run to generate the template for a guideline with properly randomized IDs.

You can the copy and paste this guideline from the command line into the correct chapter.

Filling out the guideline

Reference src/conf.py to see valid selections for unfilled options in the guideline template.

Note that the :fls: option should be filled according to the FLS paragraph ID for which the guideline is covering. One way to go about finding this is to inspect the page using your web browser. You'll be looking for something like:

<p><span class="spec-paragraph-id" id="fls_4rhjpdu4zfqj">4.1:1</span>

You would then pull fls_4rhjpdu4zfqj to place in the :fls: option.

Existing guidelines can also serve as examples on how guidelines are filled.

Code of Conduct

The Rust Foundation has adopted a Code of Conduct that we expect project participants to adhere to. Please read the full text so that you can understand what actions will and will not be tolerated.

Licenses

Rust is primarily distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0), with documentation portions covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license..

See LICENSE-APACHE, LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-documentation, and COPYRIGHT for details.

You can also read more under the Foundation's intellectual property policy.

Other Policies

You can read about other Rust Foundation policies in the footer of the Foundation website.