Should you Rust in embedded yet?
Embedded developer here, ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. I've been keeping an eye on Rust for the embedded space and although there has been a lot of movement in that area--particularly in the last couple of months--I'm not sure the value proposition fits the microcontroller market, where of course C is king.While Rust has much to offer as a programming paradigm in general, the main value is in the borrow-checker (the linked transcript cites 'memory bugs' as the most common class of bugs). Embedded software practitioners long ago abandoned dynamic memory allocation and with it the 'use-after-free' and 'out-of-bounds access' bugs, instead re-defining the problem as one of latency (e.g. you'll need to process that static buffer before it gets re-used by your UART interrupt). Take away the borrow-checker, and Rust looks less compelling.In time, Rust will find its niche in the embedded space, most likely occupying the high-level RPi/BBB/iMX SoC layer and perhaps working its way down to microcontrollers. As wiremine points out, it will require vendor support--moving away from your vendor's toolchain is a world of hurt that seasoned embedded developers just won't even consider. Pragmatism reigns: time-to-market and a cheap BoM are the main metrics, programming language a distant 10th.