Not the ESP8266 of course, but in the same vein you may be interested in effots to get Rust working on the RTL8710: https://polyfractal.com/post/rustl8710/

Do you know of any place one can track this work? Best reference google brought me was https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm-gcc-4.2/trunk/gcc/con... - but pretty hard to decipher current state from that...

Got that directly from an Espressif employee as inofficial info, but it has since been confirmed: https://twitter.com/buddy_casino/status/824299718104743938

So I guess its not in the open right now.

I wonder if its going to be specific to their chips, because the Xtensa architecture is highly configurable and so there isn't really a single target, but potentially many.

Probably not "soon", AVR took a really long time to get merged into LLVM, and that's a pre-requisite for Rust support.

I can't comment on timelines but I know someone has been working on AVR support for Rust.

Oh yeah the micro folks are definitely working on it, I meant that if work is just starting on the LLVM Xtensa backend, the Rust merge is nowhere near, and as example submitted that the AVR backend had taken a long time to be merged into LLVM and still needs to be finished & merged for Rust.

There is nothing that I could do with them, but I love their specs, specially when I think about my first MS-DOS computer.

So I imagine there would be lots of nice maker opportunities when that support comes out, not only for Rust, but for other LLVM frontends as well.

Totally, I like to think of them as this generations C64, though some might argue that the Arduino Uno or the Raspberry Pi deserve that title.