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59 changes: 59 additions & 0 deletions GOALS.md
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# Overview

## Elevator pitch

Coding guidelines are available within this repository, potentially deployed to a website mdBook-style.

## Detailed

In general these coding guidelines should be a set of rules of do / do not do with examples which should cover all "general" aspects of the Rust programming language, e.g. enums, structs, traits, and so on. We can use the [FLS](https://rust-lang.github.io/fls/index.html) as a means to ensure we have reasonable coverage of the language.

There should be an addendum which covers how various safety standards like ISO 26262 map onto the coding guidelines.

This serves as a tracking issue which is why it's considered "XL". Work will get logged against this in smaller chunks!

# Way of work

## Outline & issue breakdown

We will use the Coding Guidelines Work Items [board](https://github.com/orgs/rustfoundation/projects/1) as a means to break the work down into smaller chunks that can be tackled in a reasonable manner.

## Contribution of existing guidelines

We are very open to receiving contributed coding guidelines in whole or in part and wholly originally contributions based on learnings from past organizational experience using Rust in safety-critical projects.

## Contribution of a new guideline

A good first step is to open a new [coding guideline issue](https://github.com/rustfoundation/safety-critical-rust-coding-guidelines/issues/new?template=CODING-GUIDELINE.yml).

# Goals
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@felix91gr felix91gr Aug 11, 2025

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Most of the items in # Goals lack a verb to anchor them to the world. I think those are really important for goal-setting

  • To have coding guidelines that make a "best effort" attempt (...)
  • To have practical recommendations on how to (...)
  • (this one is ok)
  • (same)
  • To have (find or create) Clippy lints which will cover decidable guidelines.

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This is a very salient point
I'll visit this again


* Coding guidelines that make a "best effort" attempt at cataloging common pieces (e.g. functions, arithmetic, unsafe) of the Rust programming language and how they fit into a safety-critical project
* We will use [MISRA Compliance: 2020](https://misra.org.uk/app/uploads/2021/06/MISRA-Compliance-2020.pdf) for categorization
* Includes rationale with links to parts of the Rust Project and wider Rust community for guidance
* Could later be refined according to various standards, e.g. DO 178 or ISO 26262
* Practical recommendations on how to use this piece of the language
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Practical recommendations on how to use this piece of the language

Isn't this a sub-item of the "Coding guidelines which make a 'best effort' (...)" one? Since we're talking about "this piece of the language"

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Probably, I'll revisit

* May include considerations of "what" is being built, e.g. broadly speaking library software: (potentially broke down further into low-level driver code, a framework system for real-time applications, SDKs) vs application software
* Should be done in parallel with developing an addendum matrix to reduce burden of attaching these later
* We can begin with DO 178 and ISO 26262 at perhaps chapter level, maybe subsection level _for now_ and expand later
* Releases of the coding guidelines are released and tagged with the versions of stable Rust that they support (e.g. `1.42`)
* Upstream Clippy lints which will cover decidable guidelines

## Goals obtained by discussion with Tooling Subcommittee

* Make a label for each which _in theory_ is decidable or not
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For each... guideline, right?

(I'd make it explicit: Make a label for each guideline)

Though if we're talking about guidelines, I'd perhaps phrase it a bit differently, because the sentence feels a bit weird right now:

Make a label for each guideline, which describes whether said guideline is decidable or not.

Plus a link to our definition of decidable, or the Wikipedia article on Decidability otherwise.

Decidability is always a theoretical thing. So I think it's fine to omit the in theory bit. As long as we give the reader a link to know the fine details of it, I think that's plenty good enough :)

* Include for each guideline a minimum of one compliant and one non-compliant example of code, to help illustrate its exact meaning and context.
* Consider only the language reference / spec, not the tooling availability when writing the coding guidelines
* Guidelines should be evidence-based, with statistics around human error when programming Rust, to support:
1. What guidelines are written, and
2. Why a specific suggestion was made
* Produce the guidelines in an artifact that's easily machine readable and consistent format to make it easier to consume by tool vendors as a baseline (e.g. multiple JSON files, one per language piece, also potentially one large JSON concatenated together)
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Produce the guidelines in an artifact that's easily machine readable and consistent format to make it easier to consume by tool vendors as a baseline (e.g. multiple JSON files, one per language piece, also potentially one large JSON concatenated together)

Oh wow, that's a big requirement. Did they offer examples on this? I don't think there's any representation generic enough to describe an arbitrary guideline in a machine-readable format.

Aside: if it exists, let me know. Such a representation could be used to automatically construct lints.

Therefore, I must be misinterpreting this requirement.

Do you think we could ask around in the Tooling Subcommittee Zulip thread?

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Yeah, this is a good question.

My current understanding after bringing this to the Tooling Subcommittee was that the following would suffice:

  • needs.json which bundles together all of the guidelines directives we have so could be consumed by a tool
  • guidelines-ids.json which stamps each guideline directive with a hash of the contents so that a tool vendor could be aware of when a guideline has changed and thus intentionally break their build

But yeah we can definitely shop it around again to make sure this fits their needs.


# Non-goals

* For the initial version to be complete coverage of the Rust programming languages pieces
* "Something" shipped to alleviate pressure at organizations is better than "nothing available"
* For any version to be conflict-free with various members' or their organizations' viewpoints
* Members and their organizations may take different stances on how pieces of the Rust programming language should be viewed and approached. This is **okay and expected**.
* We'd like to ship something that we can obtain broad consensus on.
* Worst case scenario: there may be a section here or there which you may need to adjust in an internal version that'd downstream.
10 changes: 9 additions & 1 deletion README.md
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Coding Guidelines for Safety Critical Rust developed by the [Safety Critical Rust Consortium][safety-critical-rust-consortium].

[View the latest rendered guidelines online](https://rustfoundation.github.io/safety-critical-rust-coding-guidelines/)
[View the latest rendered guidelines online](https://coding-guidelines.arewesafetycriticalyet.org/)

Check out the [coding guideline goals](GOALS.md).

_Note_: Early, subject to changes.

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We have the same chapter layout as the [Ferrocene Language Specification](https://spec.ferrocene.dev/) (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.

### Submit coding guideline issue

For a new coding guideline you'd like to contribute, start with opening a [coding guideline issue](https://github.com/rustfoundation/safety-critical-rust-coding-guidelines/issues/new?template=CODING-GUIDELINE.yml).

Once an issue has been well-developed enough it's then time to write up the guideline.
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I don't know how I'd change this phrasing, but here's my observation: we now have an automatic PR builder after a Coding Guideline issue has been approved, right? Perhaps this description of the process could be changed, then, since it's now a different process than what is described in this line. Does that make sense?

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Agreed, this should be updated to reflect current reality 👍


### 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.
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