Embedded Rust or C firmware? Lessons from an industrial microcontroller use case

Authors are from STMicro, polytechnic Turin, Freie universitat Berlin, and Inria. Examined writing firmware for an IOT sensor platform. From the abstract:

> Two teams concurrently developing the same functionality (one in C, one in Rust) are analyzed over a period of several months. A comparative analysis of their approaches, results, and iterative efforts is provided. The analysis and measurements on hardware indicate no strong reason to prefer C over Rust for microcontroller firmware on the basis of memory footprint or execution speed. Furthermore, Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime in Rust whose footprint is smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bare-metal C stack traditionally used in this context. It is concluded that Rust is a sound choice today for firmware development in this domain.

I'm a big fan of Rust on embedded (and think embassy in particular is awesome, haven't tried this Ariel OS.)

I would say however that there's still toolchain issues here. There all kinds of MCUs that simply don't/won't have a viable compiler toolchain that would support Rust.

e.g. I recently came from a job where they built their own camera board around an older platform because it offered a compelling bundle of features (USB peripheral support and MIPI interface mainly). We were stuck with C/C++ as the toolchain there, as there was no reasonable way to make this work with Rust as it was a much older ARM ISA

"Customers are asking for Rust" would probably be the reason why ST is looking into this.

off topic question: why is there no source attached to this paper?

Nice to see serial comms supported. Are I2S and CAN on the roadmap? Do you see any sensor module suppliers support ArielOS?