Debian Mandates Rust for APT, Reshaping Ubuntu and Other Linux Distros

One of the world’s oldest and most influential Linux distributions, Debian, has officially announced plans to restructure its development strategy by adopting Rust as a core language for system-level tools and future packages.

Julian Andres Klode, a long-time Debian developer and lead maintainer of the Advanced Package Tool (APT), announced on the Debian developer list that, going forward, Rust will be a required dependency for Debian’s fundamental APT package manager.

Specifically, Klode wrote that he planned “to introduce hard Rust…