At Quantum Systems, the Rust programming language serves as the foundational technology for our future unmanned systems.
Our engineering journey to this architecture was not immediate. We began developing our platforms using traditional systems languages, but frequently encountered familiar friction points regarding concurrency, memory-related bugs, and system stability. This drove our strategic migration to Rust to guarantee the deterministic performance and high availability required in critical situations. While the initial transition to Rust was not smooth —prior knowledge of systems programming did not transfer directly, causing considerable friction in the early stages — the long-term operational benefits have been profound.
Rust spans the full depth of the technology stack — from high-level backend application services down to embedded systems running directly on our unmanned platforms. This breadth of adoption across such diverse execution environments is a testament to its versatility and sets the stage for the architectural decisions at the heart of Mosaic.
At the core of this ecosystem is the Mosaic Ground Control Station (GCS). This talk explores what Mosaic is and unpacks our implementation and the architectural decisions that leverage Rust’s common patterns, such as for internal message routing. We will also detail the technical challenges we continue to navigate and touch on the complexities of interfacing Rust with legacy components.
Crucially, we will discuss how Rust’s safety guarantees and expressive type system have transformed our engineering culture, rapidly accelerating the onboarding of new developers by allowing them to safely contribute to a mission-critical codebase.
We believe the future of autonomous defense systems is fundamentally built on Rust.
