Note that when they say support, they mean that it's fully supported and actually works well, including that OpenBSD is fully self-hosting on that platform (read: "oops, the compiler OOMs on 32-bit" is a no-go).
Now, here's the list of targets that rust supports:
Notice that all the OpenBSD targets are tier 3, and it's a strict subset of OpenBSD's platoforms. Even if we ignore everything else - a questionable choice - rust is unsuitable for writing core parts of OpenBSD because it can't actually build for all the systems that OpenBSD supports.
The point GP was (probably) trying to make is that OpenBSD's vision of security is at odds with its insistence on C, a notoriously unsafe and insecure language. There's no reason that the replacement language has to be Rust; it could be Nim or Zig or C# or Java or Vala or OpenBSD Custom Memory-Safe Language.
What it takes for OpenBSD to choose to support whichever language it wants to is primarily a commitment to actually spend its resources to support said language. That the OpenBSD targets for Rust are tier 3 is a sign of its unwillingness to consider moving away from C: what it takes to move from tier 3 to tier 2 is a set of maintainers who have a commitment to be responsive to patches, and an automated CI solution.
(Also note that OpenBSD is the largest Unix "stuck" in tier 3 for Rust. Solaris/Illumos, FreeBSD, and NetBSD all manage to have tier 2 builders. Even Fuchsia and Redox have tier 2 support!)
Comments
Here's the list of hardware platforms that OpenBSD supports:
https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
Note that when they say support, they mean that it's fully supported and actually works well, including that OpenBSD is fully self-hosting on that platform (read: "oops, the compiler OOMs on 32-bit" is a no-go).
Now, here's the list of targets that rust supports:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/platform-support.html
Notice that all the OpenBSD targets are tier 3, and it's a strict subset of OpenBSD's platoforms. Even if we ignore everything else - a questionable choice - rust is unsuitable for writing core parts of OpenBSD because it can't actually build for all the systems that OpenBSD supports.
The point GP was (probably) trying to make is that OpenBSD's vision of security is at odds with its insistence on C, a notoriously unsafe and insecure language. There's no reason that the replacement language has to be Rust; it could be Nim or Zig or C# or Java or Vala or OpenBSD Custom Memory-Safe Language.
What it takes for OpenBSD to choose to support whichever language it wants to is primarily a commitment to actually spend its resources to support said language. That the OpenBSD targets for Rust are tier 3 is a sign of its unwillingness to consider moving away from C: what it takes to move from tier 3 to tier 2 is a set of maintainers who have a commitment to be responsive to patches, and an automated CI solution.
(Also note that OpenBSD is the largest Unix "stuck" in tier 3 for Rust. Solaris/Illumos, FreeBSD, and NetBSD all manage to have tier 2 builders. Even Fuchsia and Redox have tier 2 support!)
I think sometimes people forget the openbsd project was not started with a text editor opening an empty file.
Their idea of security honestly seems very narrowly scoped on fixing a particular set of issues.