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.

Not a Rust dev, but couldn’t you use FFI to call the C routines from Rust? Of course you‘ll have glue code which is seldom pretty, and depending on the amount of Rust actually involved at runtime it might be questionable to do in the first place.

Absolutely! But this is a huge amount of complexity in build system/linker setup/debugger that you are gonna have to stay on top of. The gains from using Rust need to be overwhelming to justify a setup like that.

Also consider that calling those FFI APIs from Rust is not gonna do anything for you by itself-- you are basically just calling C functions with extra steps... To actually get anything out of it, you'll then likely have to wrap the whole hardware interface in a "rustified" API (which, again, you'll probably have to write and maintain yourself...)