Thoughts on replacement languages

Re:Thoughts on replacement languages by austinz on Saturday January 10, 2015 @06:17PM (#8868310)

I hope Rust gains traction as a language for targeting embedded systems. Rust has the following attractive characteristics for this particular domain:

* Minimal overhead (e.g. runtime), great for systems with very constrained resources

* More advanced language features than C (better macros, better type system, pattern matching, etc)

* Compile-time verification of safe usage of memory

* The ability to drop down into manual/unsafe mode for doing stuff like DMA or writing to configuration registers

c.f. this topic from a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6268291

I did a bit of embedded development (MSP430, Cortex M3, PIC18) some time ago, and I can say that having a language like Rust at my disposal would have drastically improved my productivity.

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Re:Thoughts on replacement languages by antiuniverse on Saturday January 10, 2015 @07:58PM (#8868612)

I presume you've seen https://zinc.rs/?

"Zinc is an experimental attempt to write an ARM stack that would be similar to CMSIS or mbed in capabilities but would show rust’s best safety features applied to embedded development."

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