1. There are no zero cost abstractions. But Rust ones are as close to zero as possible. You may not want to pay for these on the smallest Cortex M devices but I

1. There are no zero cost abstractions. But Rust ones are as close to zero as possible. You may not want to pay for these on the smallest Cortex M devices but I would sure take them over the pain that is debugging C code on stuff like TM4C123G. 2. That's not correct. Board support packages have some unsafe code in them, sure, but it's a misconception that this defeats the purpose of Rust. Even unsafe code has to uphold borrow checker semantics. Unsafe doesn't turn them off, you can't take two mutable references to the same variable in unsafe block, it won't compile. But you can use raw pointers and it's developer's job to make sure that pointer math is correct. This way your application code calling these low level bits of unsafe code doesn't have to do anything to benefit from the regular Rust guarantees. It's a "make things correct once, benefit always" sort of a deal. 3. In general Rust build times aren't great but I can't say they are worse than working with TI's CCS. Extended compile times on desktop are noticeable but I can't say this is true to the same extent on bare metal.