> I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust.

Rust 1.0 is 11 years old and it's still trivial to compile Rust code from then. I doubt that will change in the next 9 years.

C is an absolute nightmare in comparison. I tried to compile some old C code I had for Nordic nRF51 chips, only a few years after the chips became available. I gave up. Broken links, missing documentation, etc. etc. I can see why other people here are saying it's standard practice to archive a VM. Not really necessary for Rust.