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Rust Development Standards Overview

Purpose

Define consistent Rust standards that emphasize safety, readability, maintainability, and long-term survivability across repositories.

Core Principles

  • The Rust API Guidelines and standard library conventions are the default and highest priority.
  • Safety and correctness override cleverness or brevity.
  • Readability overrides micro-optimization.
  • Exceptions must be explicit, documented, and justified.

Tooling Expectations

  • Formatting: rustfmt (canonical, zero configuration via rust-toolchain.toml).
  • Linting: clippy (official Rust linter, 800+ lint rules).
  • Type checking: cargo check (inherent in the Rust compiler).
  • Dependency audit and license compliance: cargo-deny (advisories, licenses, bans, and sources in a single tool).
  • Coverage: cargo-llvm-cov (LLVM instrumentation, cross-platform).
  • Toolchain pinning: rust-toolchain.toml (auto-installs the correct toolchain via rustup).
  • If a repository uses different tools, document the reason and equivalents.

CI Gates

Every CI check is a hard gate. See Source Control Guidelines for the hard-gates-only standard and the CI Architecture guide for how required status checks are configured.

Hard gate definition:

  • Merge-blocking. A required status check must be configured on the target branch. Any failure blocks merge until a new commit passes.

The only sanctioned non-blocking category is the advisory-on-unsupported-versions carve-out: a check is advisory because the runtime version it runs against is outside the supported set (a preview version not yet promoted, or an EOL version past upstream support), not because the check itself is a generic soft gate. See the Runtime Version Support Policy for the carve-out. Rust runs no version-matrix advisory jobs today, so all of its gates are hard gates.

Hard gates (all are required status checks):

  • test: unit (current)
  • test: integration
  • ci: dependency-audit

Branch applicability:

  • develop: all hard gates required
  • release: all hard gates required
  • main: all hard gates required

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