Recently, the open-source community Rust released version 1.71.0, providing native support for the LoongArch instruction set architecture (ISA). Developers can build LoongArch operating systems based on the source code in the upstream community or directly download a binary version released by the Rust community. Rust developers will enjoy a good development experience on the LoongArch platform.

Introduction to Rust

Rust is an emerging system-level programming language in recent years, which focuses on safety, concurrency, and performance. Rust possesses various type systems and ownership models and can ensure memory safety and thread safety by checking memory accesses and concurrency issues during compilation. Rust exhibits excellent concurrent performance in the construction of parallel and distributed applications. Such high performance makes Rust suitable for writing efficient system software, such as operating system kernels, embedded device drivers, and network servers.

Rust Support for LoongArch

In the previous version, Rust 1.70.0, the Rust community merged the initial support patch set for the loongarch64-unknown-linux-gnu compilation target, providing preliminary Tier-3 support for LoongArch. This time, the Rust 1.71.0 release elevates the support for LoongArch to Tier 2. This progress signifies that the Rust community will natively build and release binary versions for LoongArch, just like other popular ISA communities. The construction of an open-source LoongArch ecosystem has therefore seen another solid step forward.

In recent years, Loongson's team has been an active contributor to the Rust community, with over 80 pull requests being accepted. These contributions have been recognized by the community, and relevant maintainers have become members of the Rust team. Going forward, Loongson will make continuous efforts to enrich functions, improve quality, optimize performance, and enhance the development experience to jointly build a new pattern for open-source ecosystems.