Lynx and Rust

The Military and Aerospace industries are facing a diverse set of challenges right now. If I were to sum it up, there is a desire for the US to drive innovation at a pace unmatched by our rivals. As a specific example, in the military segment, one of the well-documented desires is to maintain air dominance. This must be achieved in the face of some strong headwinds;

• A massive gap exists between the number of engineers this industry needs to deliver on the objective and the ability of the industry to hire top-notch talent
• The rising complexity of systems is forcing the industry to adopt new development methodologies to reduce development cycles dramatically
• Systems are becoming more connected in order to make them more effective. An evolution to “systems of systems,” if you will. This creates huge challenges for competitors to attack these systems so our customers must produce a strategy to continually raise the bar of immunity these systems have to cyberattack and reverse engineering
• Budgets are not unlimited!

A lot of our focus around the strategic direction of the company is centered around providing some answers to these (and a few more) swim lanes. Our introduction of LynxElement, the industry’s first unikernel to be based on a safety-certified real-time operating system, is a jigsaw piece associated with the 3rd of those challenges. With the growth mindset underway at Lynx, I am confident we will be coming back to these themes and highlighting how we are endeavoring to help our customers and, indeed, their customers address these challenges, either directly or through the combined efforts of Lynx and its partner ecosystem.

Today, we announced an important piece associated with the first item. This industry has been using software languages like C, C++ and Ada for decades. We have been watching the growth of Rust for quite a while and like the properties associated with that development chain that assist in the creation of higher-quality code. This language is gaining popularity with the next wave of developers and we believe the time is right to bring that developer ecosystem into the world of safety electronics in Space, Sky, Sea and, the Earth’s Surface.

Our partnership with Adacore/Ferrous will bring a reliable Rust toolchain into the Lynx developer environment, which enables customers to create applications in Rust for deployment on LynxOS-178 and/or the Lynx Unikernel. More work lies ahead of us to get this to a stable production-quality release….but we are able to provide this software to alpha sites with immediate effect.