[0xcde4c3db]

My experience doing this sort of stuff in C is that this class of complexities is still present, but hidden outside the source in the crt0 and build scripts. Putting it in the actual program text seems like an improvement.

[e12e]

Exactly. I saw the gp comment and feared there was lots of boilerplate, arcane incantations -- and the only slightly smelly thing in the (IMNHO) beautiful and short example is the use of an empty asm block to "fight" the compiler on optimizing out the busy loop.

I can't imagine the full C example for this is any prettier or easier to follow?

[ed: As for "no name mangling" - having such an easy way to turn it off when needed, and yet avoid collisions when you do need it seems pretty good to me. Perhaps just having something that's "extern" be umangled by default would be better -- but it's not like one needs to bend over backwards to get a "mostly safe" bare metal program here.]

[slackersc]

I think you're giving it a bit more credit than necessary. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that they've got it running on a RPi, but it's almost word for word what you'd write in C (right down to needing to inline assembly to get a busy loop to work). The C implementation wouldn't need to bring in a bleeding edge nightly build, worry about name mangling etc..

[cowsandmilk]

The purpose of the article was to show how to get up and running with rust on a Raspberry Pi, not to show how that rust is easier to use than C for programming a Raspberry Pi.

Plenty of things I do are are word for word the same in C and python. (import math vs. #include <math.h> , math.sin(x) vs. sin(x), etc.)

It is when you want to build something more complex than a blinking light that the differences between languages come out.