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.

For some complex peripherals (especially wireless) this may be the case, but in my experience it's often much easier to write small abstractions for what you need in the mode you need it in (for serial, timers, IO, DMA, ...) than relying on manufacturer SDKs, which are often so poorly documented that you need the reference manual anyways to understand the peripheral to then understand the abstraction, which is often much more complex to use than it needs to be for my use cases. With abstractions in Rust or, for something quickly thrown together, in uPython you're at least getting "you're holding it wrong errors".

Interfacing with the peripheral registers themselves is also a bit simpler with Rust in my experience, as a proper .svd already contains bitfield setups with enums and R/RW/W1 information to at least set the bits you want instead of the Macro-Hell in C some manufacturers throw at you.