Rust bindings to nrf52 series

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user75307 — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 09:42:51 GMT

Manufacturer support? Ha! C++ has been a far better choice for embedded code for a very long time, but the industry still insists on C. I use C++ exclusively on Çortex-M devices, and have benefited greatly in terms of development time, reliability, readability, maintainability, and so on. Rust is interesting, but immature. C programmers can segue into C++ much more easily and gain essentially all the same benefits.

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user16174 — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:34:45 GMT

I was about to post in the forums asking for Rust support and found this. Let me add a data point: there are (many) of us who, while writing lots of code in C, appreciate recent advancements and would *love* to switch to Rust, at least for some of the code.

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user24103 — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 06:24:42 GMT

Great to see, that already someone started this. I thought about doing something like this when I took a first look at rust some years ago (I think I even tested something on a STM32). I hope I can find some time in the future to contribute to this - until then - good luck and thumbs up! ;-)

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user8025 — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 17:39:46 GMT

Rust targets the LLVM, which is the compilation toolchain used for industry standard languages such as C++, Obj-C and Swift and is very mature + highly optimized at this point, with support from companies such as Microsoft, Apple, etc.

Rust ensures zero-cost abstractions, pattern matching, memory safety (no dangling pointers, etc), at compile time rather than at run-time.

Rust's procedural macro system is much more powerful than C macros, and enables you to create things like "futures" which can abstract away things like manually coded state machines. The closest thing in C I've found are "protothreads" which are still not "zero-cost".

If you need to drop down to manual memory manipulation and ignore Rust's safety guarantees around memory and data races, they provide an escape hatch keyword called "unsafe", which doesn't tend to need to be used.

I do agree, the tooling around Rust on the embedded side needs improvement, and James Munns's wrapper around the nRF52 SDK needs another layer to abstract the unsafe calls, but I'd be very happy to use Rust to create useful libraries which I'd call into from C at this point, just not as the application level code as well. I've been experimenting with calling into cbindgen to build a no-std library to integrate with C code as Rust has a very good FFI thanks to it's lack of a runtime.

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user17652 — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 17:06:45 GMT

Is that the best 60-second pitch for rust that you can come up with?

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user15402 — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 15:04:25 GMT

If you are interested in this topic, also search for japaric, svd2rust, "tock os", "embedded rust", and "open source bluetooth stack". If you are open to omitting the Nordic SDK entirely, and want the benefits of Rust in lower layers.

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user17652 — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 02:08:15 GMT

In other words, yet another Java? Seriously, for a crotchety curmudgeon like yours truly who's a diehard C advocate (fyi, 30 yeras back would be c, and 40 years back would be Lisp & Fortran), why should I go through the pain of picking up another language that feels (<---- you do know this is a subjective judgement, don't you?) modern when there are tons of other modern languages to pick from, say Go for instance?

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user67773 — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 22:34:33 GMT

Why Rust? Language designers have learned a lot in 40 years. Rust has:

Built in tooling for compilation against different targets. Managing toolchains for different targets is officially supported
Built in, standard package manager
A type system that gives you abstraction without necessarily requiring indirection or additional memory cost. It's possible to get the compiler assurance of abstractions, but with zero-sized types.
compile time checking of race conditions and dangling pointers (although less important in single-threaded/no-heap environments).

It's true that C++ has most/all of the "features" Rust has, but there is a benefit to using a language with a design that feels modern, and with strong built in tooling.

RE: Rust bindings to nrf52 series

user17652 — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 22:26:42 GMT

What's the advantage of using Rust instead of C?