4 ms·

>Rust is almost certainly (at least a large part of) the future Can you name any design wins for Rust in a product's embedded SW, embedded OS, or device driver

>Rust is almost certainly (at least a large part of) the future Can you name any design wins for Rust in a product's embedded SW, embedded OS, or device drivers? I've never seen it in the wild. How does Rust deal with hard RT? I'd be interested to see what people had to say.

brundolf 5y ago
I have very little direct experience with embedded but I've heard several people talk about having a good experience using Rust for it. It's not hard for me to imagine memory safety without a runtime being pretty useful in that context, if nothing else. That said, I know embedded moves slower than a lot of other areas so maybe "the future" is farther out in that case.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
I haven't written anything in rust, but RTIC seems like it might be roughly equivalent to a project like FreeRTOS https://crates.io/crates/cortex-m-rtic https://crates.io/crates/cortex-m-rtic
follower 5y ago
There does seem to be a lot of people who are very excited about the potential for Rust as a replacement for C/C++ in the embedded space. There is "Working Group" dedicated to the domain: https://www.rust-lang.org/what/embedded https://www.rust-lang.org/what/embedded & https://blog.rust-embedded.org/newsletter-28/ https://blog.rust-embedded.org/newsletter-28/ Toward the bottom of the page there's a "Production use" section with some quotes from people @ companies using it. There's also an Embedded Rust "book": https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/ https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/ In addition to the language itself, the surrounding tooling (e.g. for package management) contributes to the potential wins available from to moving to Rust. My impression is that there are still areas where there isn't yet an idiomatic solution as to how _best_ to represent certain embedded SW concepts in a way that allows Rust's guarantees to be maintained. So I think there's some churn around that as people experiment/learn. (Primarily in relation to some of the physical constraints of the hardware.) One of the companies prominent in the Rust embedded space is Ferrous Systems: https://ferrous-systems.com/ https://ferrous-systems.com/ While it's still early days, relatively speaking, I think a lot of people see a move to Rust as a "once in a generation" opportunity to finally move on from an embedded ecosystem built on substandard vendor C toolchains & also gain from the robustness/safety that Rust offers. In a lot of ways the embedded domain stands to gain even more from what Rust offers because unlike, say, the desktop/server space there isn't another higher level language that's really an option. I'm fairly early in my Rust learning journey but have played a bit with it on an STM32F7 dev board. But so far have spent more time on non-embedded side of things. (Although one of the appealing aspects of Rust for me is that I can use the language on platforms ranging from embedded to server/desktop to the browser (via WebAssembly). And the knowledge is transferable & even a lot of the library support too--thanks to "no_std" packages/crates that have reduced overhead.) As an aside, while learning off & on over an extended period of time, I've found this post really helpful for (re-)learning how to read Rust: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust The post aims to go "through as many Rust snippets as I can, and explain what the keywords and symbols they contain mean" which I've found a useful approach.
follower 5y ago
Also, this post has some useful feedback on experience/lessons from using Rust in production in the embedded space: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hkjn6f/rust_in_embedded_how_is_it_working_for_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hkjn6f/rust_in_embedd...

brundolf 5y ago

I have very little direct experience with embedded but I've heard several people talk about having a good experience using Rust for it. It's not hard for me to imagine memory safety without a runtime being pretty useful in that context, if nothing else. That said, I know embedded moves slower than a lot of other areas so maybe "the future" is farther out in that case.

Rebelgecko 5y ago

I haven't written anything in rust, but RTIC seems like it might be roughly equivalent to a project like FreeRTOS https://crates.io/crates/cortex-m-rtic https://crates.io/crates/cortex-m-rtic

follower 5y ago

There does seem to be a lot of people who are very excited about the potential for Rust as a replacement for C/C++ in the embedded space. There is "Working Group" dedicated to the domain: https://www.rust-lang.org/what/embedded https://www.rust-lang.org/what/embedded & https://blog.rust-embedded.org/newsletter-28/ https://blog.rust-embedded.org/newsletter-28/ Toward the bottom of the page there's a "Production use" section with some quotes from people @ companies using it. There's also an Embedded Rust "book": https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/ https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/ In addition to the language itself, the surrounding tooling (e.g. for package management) contributes to the potential wins available from to moving to Rust. My impression is that there are still areas where there isn't yet an idiomatic solution as to how _best_ to represent certain embedded SW concepts in a way that allows Rust's guarantees to be maintained. So I think there's some churn around that as people experiment/learn. (Primarily in relation to some of the physical constraints of the hardware.) One of the companies prominent in the Rust embedded space is Ferrous Systems: https://ferrous-systems.com/ https://ferrous-systems.com/ While it's still early days, relatively speaking, I think a lot of people see a move to Rust as a "once in a generation" opportunity to finally move on from an embedded ecosystem built on substandard vendor C toolchains & also gain from the robustness/safety that Rust offers. In a lot of ways the embedded domain stands to gain even more from what Rust offers because unlike, say, the desktop/server space there isn't another higher level language that's really an option. I'm fairly early in my Rust learning journey but have played a bit with it on an STM32F7 dev board. But so far have spent more time on non-embedded side of things. (Although one of the appealing aspects of Rust for me is that I can use the language on platforms ranging from embedded to server/desktop to the browser (via WebAssembly). And the knowledge is transferable & even a lot of the library support too--thanks to "no_std" packages/crates that have reduced overhead.) As an aside, while learning off & on over an extended period of time, I've found this post really helpful for (re-)learning how to read Rust: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust The post aims to go "through as many Rust snippets as I can, and explain what the keywords and symbols they contain mean" which I've found a useful approach.

follower 5y ago

Also, this post has some useful feedback on experience/lessons from using Rust in production in the embedded space: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hkjn6f/rust_in_embedded_how_is_it_working_for_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hkjn6f/rust_in_embedd...