Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?
May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.
The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that Big Blue uses for its C, C++, and Fortran compilers for AIX. This Rust compiler for AIX is available under subscription with support contracts, much like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other systems software.
On May 16, IBM put out an update for the Rust SDK for AIX based on Rust 1.86, maintaining currency with the Rist community, which you can read about in announcement letter AD25-1068. And that got us to thinking that maybe Rust should be available for IBM i, too, and embedding it into PASE, like so many functions and databases and programming languages are, would be a good way to accomplish this.
Rust was created back in 2010 and reached its 1.0 release in 2015. It is used by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and many other companies, and offers performance similar to C and C++ and unlike Java does not require garbage collection, which is an inhibitor to performance. Rust is noteworthy in that it is, along with C and assembly language, one of the three ways Linus Torvalds will accept code into the Linux kernel. It is a much lower-level language than RPG and COBOL, but a hell of a lot friendlier than C or C++ and not as messy and slow as Java. It is one of the fastest growing programming languages, which is a key reason to adopt it into the IBM i platform. Moreover, new programs will increasingly be written in Rust, and neat new things will be able to come to the IBM i platform if Rust is supported.
If you think this is a good idea, tell IBM.
Nice keeping up with the bleeding edge.
Still, we need updated C/C++ compilers for ILE native targets, due attention should go there…
The IBM Open SDK for Rust on AIX 1.86 supports IBM i PASE 7.5 and 7.6.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/osfroa/1.86.0?topic=prerequisites-system