At last week’s DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large.
Fabian noted in his DebConf25 presentation that around 8% of the source packages in Debian Sid are building against at least one librust-* package. That 8% figure for Debian source packages building against at least one Rust library package is around double of what it is for Debian 12 “Bookworm”. Quite a significant uptake over the past few years and it’s only continuing to grow with more open-source projects introducing varying levels of Rust integration.
There are also over three thousand source packages shipping Rust source code within librust-*-dev and 150 source packaes shipping compiled Rust binaries/libraries on Debian.
Fabian went on to note some of the CPU architecture differences between what the Rust toolchain supports and what Debian Linux supports, differences to the GNU toolchain, and other details to help Debian developers in packaging Rust applications. Those wanting to learn more about Rust packaging in Debian can see the PDF slide deck from the DebConf25 presentation.
