There are two parts to this question: Is it a good idea and would it have significant enough benefits to justify switching from C or even assembly, and do you think we will actually see a major shift to Rust-based programming platforms in the next few years.

  • Ephera
    2•3 years ago

    I think, it might happen maybe 5-10 years from now.

    Rust is still a relatively young language and there’s still rather much movement in the ecosystem. New libraries appear constantly and others become unmaintained.
    With microcontrollers and such, you need very specific libraries, so there’s even less selection, and you want libraries that’ll be around for a couple years.

    Add to that, the usual friction of new technology adoption.

    Eventually, though, I definitely think that it will take over. There’s now a whole generation of devs that are used to safety belts so much that a low-level language with safety belts will see a lot of interest.

  • @chrysn
    1•3 years ago

    At least for my use cases it’s already there; especially the ecosystem around embedded-hal is already way ahead of what’s there in C.

    The lack of maturity in terms of still developing modules is partially made up for by cargo’s ability to manage different crate versions in dependencies – if some internal part needs v1 of a crate that is now developed in a v3, it can still work (as long as you have a good grasp on its security implications).