The US government has a very long history projecting it's will on other countries. Under the guise of national security, what is stopping the US government from changing Rust to prevent it from working in Russia, Iran, or Canada? The scenario is somewhat hyperbolic, but the US and European centric nature of Rust gives people in less developed nations pause.
How would one change a programming language to not work in a country?
Even assuming that is possible, the answer is the same as any open source project: you’d have to convince the teams to make that decision. Nothing special there.
A senator^Wcongressman asked some questions about Rust and its nightly toolchain whenever Facebook’s cryptocurrency was under scrutiny by regulators. A French government agency has a whole set of coding guidelines for Rust. The government of Quatar was using Rust before 1.0; haven’t heard much since, but I assume they’re still using it. A New Zealand firefighter company was using some Rust.
Programming languages are tools. Governments use tools. It shouldn’t be surprising that they may have an interest.
That said I find your parent comment also a bit silly for the other reasons you state.
They care deeply about software security and memory flaws (everyone should). If rust had an ISO standard, then it could be used in more sensitive military and aerospace systems.
Something being an ISO standard has nothing to do with being able to send OFAC after you? Fundamentally the difference is providing a service vs an idea just existing in the ether. You can't sanction Rust, it's just an idea. You could tell rustup they can't allow downloads from IPs that match sanctioned countries.
If the US gov decides to project its will on your software project, an ISO standard is not going to help you at all. They will sabotage the ISO process, or force your hosting provider (GitHub) to remove your project or apply changes to it, or just kidnap your maintainers and beat them with wrenches until they comply[0].
If your threat model legitimately considers the US gov to be a hostile actor, you need far more than a piece of paper that claims what the behavior of your compiler is.
