You know a language has arrived when its toolchain ships as a standard component with operating systems.
Rust, Mozilla's language for safe and speedy systems level programming, has landed a prime-time slot in the next edition of Fedora Linux, according to the change set for the first public alpha for Fedora 25.
This doesn't mean that any system components in Fedora will be authored with Rust -- yet. But it does mean that Fedora users, many of whom are developers, will have easy access to Rust's ecosystem in their Fedora environments.
The mission is basic: Make sure Rust's compiler and its Cargo package management tool are present in the system and are maintained there by Fedora's own folks.
Fedora aims to include Rust 1.11 this time around. Because Rust is updated on a six-week cycle, it's still under debate if the version of Rust included with Fedora should be kept up to date during the lifetime of any particular version of the OS or whether such updates should be left to the user.
Fedora's rationale for including Rust stems from both the language's growing popularity and its potential relevance to Fedora's user base. Aside from citing Rust's presence in the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey as one of the most loved languages, Red Hat noted, "Mozilla is starting to use Rust in Firefox, and now Fedora's Firefox maintainers could enable those components."
Other languages included in Fedora are also being buffed in version 25. Google's Go will be boosted to the recently released 1.7, Node.js will be upgraded to version 6.x, the PHP stack will now run the better-performing version 7.0, and Ruby on Rails is being bumped to version 5, which has been released after many years of development. Erlang and Haskell, two major specimens of the functional language world, are also getting their Fedora-bundled compilers upgraded to newer versions.