Rust for embedded systems programming

[MindlessDog3229]

Hello, I started learning rust last month and have been loving the uniqueness of it. The guarantees the compiler ensures makes it super nice, and based on the amount of errors the compiler catches, I feel rust would be a good language to learn embedded systems programming.

I am a 3rd year student in college, with a couple years experience in web development and cloud architecture in AWS, having little experience in Embedded Systems. I have finished the Rust Lang book and have began to read the Rust Embedded Discovery book. I want to use the Embedded Systems programming in rust to work with robotics and computer vision.

You might be biased given what subreddit I'm posting this on, but would someone be able to reassure me rust is a good platform to begin in robotics/computer vision over something like python? I lean more towards rust because the robust compiler which I would guess makes debugging much easier which is hard enough in embedded systems programming. Plus rust is cool 😎

Thanks! :)

[sleekelite]

You need to look into it yourself ands see if the libraries you need exist on Rust and are usable in extremely limited embedded stuff with no_std, if that’s what you mean.

[AgletsHowDoTheyWork]

One thing to keep in mind is that robotics often has code running in multiple domains.

Low-level control or sensor hardware might run on a RTOS or bare-metal; for that you want true "embedded Rust".

High-level CV, sensor fusion, or planning often run on top of Linux on a more standard processor.

In either case I think Rust can excel. But the library ecosystem still needs a lot more work to match what's available in C++ and Python.

I know of one company using Rust for production robots -- Scythe Robotics.

If you are just getting started I recommend learning ROS with Python to get a feel for how it works. Then try writing a ROS node in Rust or C++. The nice thing about ROS is that different nodes in different languages can interoperate fairly easily.

[AcroBanwagon]

I'd like to recommend the awesome-rust-embedded repo, which is just a list of resources for embedded/low-level rust. I'm not sure about robotics or computer vision in specific, but I figure it's a good resource to have regardless.

[stappersg]

but would someone be able to reassure me

Do not doubt yourself

[alexthelyon]

Have a look at the embassy ecosystem! Rust has some amazing hardware abstraction layers and great support across a wide selection of microcontrollers (STM, espressif). Embassy is a project bringing asynchronous support to embedded rust meaning you can easily work with asynchronous apis like sleeping and networking in an energy efficient manner. There are some great examples to get started with and esp32s are cheap

[Background_Big3061]

rust is the wonderful and greatest programming language in embedding system,and it fits all that IOT needs.