D-Bus is an IPC mechanism that is very ubiquitous on Linux systems everywhere (desktop, cloud and embedded). It is the mechanism you'd use to communicate with many of the core Linux userspace subsystems, such as systemd, NetworkManager etc. Traditionally, most of these services have been written in C, a language known for its lack of safety and expressiveness.

In the past years, Zeeshan has developed a library, called zbus for enabling implementation of D-Bus services and clients in a programming language designed for safety: Rust. zbus has become the go-to library for writing D-Bus code in Rust. While that is major step forward, the communication typically still happens through a broker and the two major broker implementation are both are written in C and have been stagnating for years.

This is why Zeeshan has recently started working on writing a D-Bus broker based on zbus, called busd, which not only aims provide a drop-in replacement for existing brokers, but also modernize the D-Bus space by providing new features needed by apps and services, such as systemd.

In this talk, Zeeshan will walk us through a summary of his journey so far, the current state of busd and his plans and dreams for the future of D-Bus.