Embedded Rust in Production?

A very important point that the article neglects is that for a lot of embedded platforms, you have to heavily rely on the hardware manufacturers libraries and tooling. All of that stuff is typically gonna be targeted at C.

Without this, using even very simple hardware interfaces (like an SPI/I2C bus) is gonna be a huge pain, because you'll have to comb through reference manuals and register descriptions for your processor and piece everything together yourself instead of just calling a few API functions (this is also very error-prone and using Rust is not really gonna help one bit).

The only chance to get even halfway decent rust integration is to pick one of the like 3 most popular hardware platforms among hobby enthusiasts (think ESP32, raspberry pico), which is simply not viable for a LOT of embedded applications.

So I still think its probably a really bad idea for a typical embedded-shop to fully go for rust right now-- the downsides from lacking tooling/libraries, reduced developer pool and the need to train extant devs appear very hard to overcome to me.

> A very important point that the article neglects is that for a lot of embedded platforms, you have to heavily rely on the hardware manufacturers libraries and tooling. All of that stuff is typically gonna be targeted at C.

If you have a reference implementation in C it's not such a big job to set up something like an I2C or SPI peripheral. At it's core, you're making a sequence of writes to some memory locations. Most of the manufacturer libraries are quite low quality, and very easy to misuse. In my experience trying to do anything that pushes the hardware, you will end up combing through the reference manuals anyway.

I've done a bit of embedded rust, and the huge benefit - just like on desktop - is that code which compiles tends to do what you intended. Obviously there's still scope for logic errors, but that takes away a huge amount of debugging time.