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Is anyone using Rust for embedded work ?

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I use it professionally. We implement a bunch of baremetal software in it, specifically bootloaders and security firmware. My take is that it's mostly been better than C. We can write code with much higher confidence that it's free from the types of bugs that plague C code if you're not careful. When we were crunching through large portions of code individually, integration was very painless, whereas in C the same kind of integration or refactoring work can be a nightmare. That said, the immaturity of the tooling is definitely a pain point. We have to do a lot more work to get tooling equivalent to what we could get from C, specifically in terms of integrating it into our build systems. And there are some dark corners where we're doing unusual things that the language didn't have in mind, and there's no escape hatch within the language yet to express what we want in pure Rust. Specifically this is painful for bootloaders, where the compiler assumes it knows about all code that's going to run on the processor, but in fact it doesn't because we're loading other code. Answer from BigPeteB on reddit.com

Rust

rust-lang.org › what › embedded

Embedded devices - Rust Programming Language

Write a library or driver once, and use it with a variety of systems, ranging from very small microcontrollers to powerful SBCs. Learn more · As part of the Rust open source project, support for embedded systems is driven by a best-in-class open source community, with support from commercial ...

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r/embedded on Reddit: Is anyone using Rust for embedded work ?

February 9, 2024 -

How are you finding it ? Are you using it on bare metal or with an (RT)OS ? What compiler are you using ? How is it better than C/C++ ?

Thanks

Edit

I'm looking at Rust for the fun of it. I'm just getting into it.

There are some things I like like:

- using {} as a placeholder for a var in a print statement. I don't like println!. Makes me think of Pascal.

- using AND, XOR, etc for bitwise ops.

- directly stating the size and type of the number - i32, u8, etc, instead of char, double, long, etc.

- slicing arrays is nice. Maybe I've been working in Python too much lately.

- I love /// and //! for generating doc right from the code comments.

Haven't used it enough to know what I don't like yet.

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I use it professionally. We implement a bunch of baremetal software in it, specifically bootloaders and security firmware. My take is that it's mostly been better than C. We can write code with much higher confidence that it's free from the types of bugs that plague C code if you're not careful. When we were crunching through large portions of code individually, integration was very painless, whereas in C the same kind of integration or refactoring work can be a nightmare. That said, the immaturity of the tooling is definitely a pain point. We have to do a lot more work to get tooling equivalent to what we could get from C, specifically in terms of integrating it into our build systems. And there are some dark corners where we're doing unusual things that the language didn't have in mind, and there's no escape hatch within the language yet to express what we want in pure Rust. Specifically this is painful for bootloaders, where the compiler assumes it knows about all code that's going to run on the processor, but in fact it doesn't because we're loading other code.

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I've seen some occasional comments on this sub of people using rust. I have never seen it in my professional career thus far. I still did some courses and code challenges with it, though. Everything I have personally seen and had the opportunity to work on is C. If it isn't C, it's C++.

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Are people happy with embedded Rust in production?

I ran into a wall - probe-rs It could just be my total ignorance, but the few 'getting started' guides I used all used probe-rs. Like the embassy project uses it. The problem is my work uses windows laptops, but with the official jlink driver. To use probe-rs you have to use a tool to swap the driver with another one. Why I can't use the same one probe-rs uses also confuses me. Some of our tools require the official driver. so I cant be swapping out the official jlink driver with the one probe-rs needs between development and test. Thats like 2-3 times a day, which doesnt seem like a lot, but it's another thing that eats up time. My IT department said 'we dont allow you swapping the driver out'. Of course engineers have admin, so we CAN, but theoretically will get in trouble And I thought. Oh well, I'll just generate the hex or bin, and maybe rust can generate something with debug symbols and I'll just load it without probe-rs. spent an hour trying to figure it out and gave up. so again, im sure it's something noobie-related but 3 hrs fighting drivers and build options to get blinky on an nrf52 had be like 'nah' Also the big thing that c/c++ offers are vendor libraries. I believe rust offers really good c/c++ integration, but native libs would be preferred. So we run into these issues PLUS: lack of candidates to hire old guys dont wanna learn something new mid guys do, but there is a huge learning curve half the team is a 'services' company that writes libraries for us, so we'd have to pay for them to learn rust C does everything we need guarantee of memory safety really isn't that important (at least where I work) More on reddit.com

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June 19, 2024

Rust for embedded

I'm using esp-hal + Embassy on ESP32-S3 right now and I'm really liking it. It's still unfinished in some part but it's heading in the right direction. esp-hal seems to be taking over as the recommended way to do Rust on ESP32 according to Espressif: https://developer.espressif.com/blog/2025/02/rust-esp-hal-beta/ More on reddit.com

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March 24, 2025

Which hardware to choose for learning embedded Rust?

ESP32-C3 is (kind of) cheap, has an official rust SDKs and the advantage of not needing a separate debug probe (which you do more or less need for the Pi Pico). Also it has WIFI. That being said, I haven't done much more than the equivalent of "Hello world" on mine and so I can't really give an extensive review. More on reddit.com

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