Eh, not really. OpenBSD is about simplicity more than anything else. It's no surprise that they don't want Rust, which is very complicated, into the OS. Also rustc is super complicated, and very slow.

For example, for a time OpenBSD was trying to switch to pcc, a super simple C compiler so they could get off gcc. They eventually went with clang instead, which is not simple, but presumably the cost of using an alternative to gcc or clang was too high.

It's not a snub of the language, it's a complaint about the compiler using all your memory. That's not an unreasonable complaint.

It was also written 3 or so years ago, so hopefully rust has improved.

I agree with your comment, but how often does a high memory program get better at memory usage over time? My intuition is that use of resources goes almost exclusively in one direction. Layers get added, less often removed. On the other hand the typical RAM amounts in common hardware gets higher too.

Firefox did, while they did MemShrink project: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. I note that Rust is in part developed by the same organization that brought a successful MemShrink project, so you should be more hopeful.

Nice. On the other hand, I feel like people will tolerate high memory usage in a compiler much more than they will in a browser. Memory usage in general is very different between the two - in a compiler it will perform many allocations and discard quickly, whereas the pain in a browser is more likely sustained memory usage from long-running instances.

Note that he did not snub the language but its toolchain.

I think they already have enough trouble with Rust in the ports tree that they don't want the same thing in base.

OpenBSD has to be able to build itself on fairly lean hardware, it's a design goal for the project. Rust has been in ports and packages forever if you want to install it.