Berlin based technology consultancy specialising in the Rust programming language. We offer development, implementation, training and long-term support.

Ferrous Systems' focus on embedded systems and Rust development provides readers with  insights into building safe, reliable, and performant software for resource-constrained environments. From bare-metal programming to real-time operating systems, Ferrous Systems offers expertise and guidance for navigating the unique challenges of embedded development with Rust.

Ferrous Systems

Ferrous Systems explores multiple approaches to statically verifying that certain functions are never called in a Rust program, motivated by Ferrocene's need to certify a subset of `core` to IEC 61508 (SIL-2). Approaches covered include Clippy lints, effect type systems, linker-based tricks (no-panic), cfg hacks, and ultimately a custom rustc compiler driver. The chosen solution implements a callgraph analysis with two passes: a pre-monomorphization THIR pass for fast `cargo check` feedback, and a post-monomorphization MIR pass for reliable certification-grade analysis. The tool catches panics, unvalidated function calls, function pointer coercions, and dynamic trait object casts, even across crate boundaries and through generics.

Callgraph analysis

1.2 The language approach: effect (type-)systems

1.3 The toolchain approach: linker errors

1.5 The static analysis approach: a custom compiler driver