I looked away from rust for about a year and a half because I couldn’t find tools for my embedded projects. In that time, it seems like I missed a lot. Rust on ARM Cortex-m looks pretty mature, with a fair amount of tooling. This video covers the highlights, and the presenter’s blog has more info (and some general embedded advice as well). A search for cortex, f3, f4, or arm on crates.io produces a lot of promising results. I need to play fewer video games and pay more attention!
December 12, 2017
December 8, 2017
Rust for Microcontrollers
When I started looking at Rust, I liked the fact that it claims to be a memory safe language with no garbage collector. I thought this would be great for microcontrollers. Sadly, at that time there weren’t any microcontroller targets easily available. Things seem to have changed a lot. I’m aware of 3 microcontroller targets available for rust:
- AVR-Rust which is a functional but early port of rust for Atmel AVR controllers. I’ve been working on some basic examples similar to the basic arduino demos.
- Rust for Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers. The most polished process is documented here.
- There is also a crate and some language support for MSP430. There is an issue to track problems with the port.
I’m neither a rust expert, not a microcontroller expert, so I’ve spent a lot of time catching up. Most of my effort has been put toward understanding the AVR-Rust system. It has been fun but I haven’t produced anything noteworthy yet.