Rust Expands Horizons: New Platform Officially Supported

Rust now supports a new platform: what has changed for developers?

The Rust language developer community continues to actively expand its ecosystem. As part of the latest update, Rust has received official support for a new platform, opening up additional opportunities for systems programming and embedded solutions. This news is especially important for engineers working with non-standard architectures and striving for high performance and code safety.

Which platform has been added?

We are talking about adding official support for the RISC-V (RV64GC) target architecture with a full set of tools. Rust previously had experimental support, but it has now been promoted to stable status. This means developers can use the entire arsenal of the language — from the Cargo package manager to the standard library — without the need for custom configurations.

Key changes in the release

• Stable Tier 2 target: The riscv64gc-unknown-linux-gnu platform is now officially supported at the compiler level. This guarantees regular testing and bug fixes.
• Full integration with the standard library: All std modules (collections, input/output, threads) now work correctly on this architecture.
• Support for LLVM 18: The new compiler backend allows generating optimized machine code for RISC-V, which is especially important for embedded systems and IoT devices.
• Improved bare-metal support: For those developing operating systems or hypervisors, a separate target riscv64gc-unknown-none-elf has been added.

Why is this important?

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) that is gaining popularity in the industry. Unlike proprietary ARM or x86, RISC-V allows designing custom chips without royalty fees. Rust support on this platform gives developers the following advantages:

• Memory safety: Rust's ownership system prevents memory leaks and data races — critically important properties for embedded systems.
• Zero-cost abstractions: High-level Rust code does not compromise on performance compared to low-level C, which is ideal for RISC-V.
• Rapid development: The Cargo ecosystem and crates.io allow code reuse, speeding up the creation of firmware and drivers.

How to get started?

To work with the new platform, simply update the Rust compiler to the latest version (rustup update) and add the target:

rustup target add riscv64gc-unknown-linux-gnu

After that, you can compile projects specifying the architecture. For example, to build a package, use the command:

cargo build --target riscv64gc-unknown-linux-gnu

For bare-metal environments, a separate target riscv64gc-unknown-none-elf is provided. Setup documentation is already available in the official Rust repository.

Impact on the industry

This step confirms Rust's strategy as a language for all platforms — from cloud servers to microchips. This is especially relevant for projects related to the Internet of Things (IoT), automotive electronics, and specialized processors. Major companies such as Google (with its KataOS project) and Western Digital