[kibwen]

  > like binary size, ease of dealing with raw pointers, etc

The majority in the size of typical Rust binaries is the huge amount of space (400 kb or so) that it takes to statically link jemalloc. But if you're building for a device that doesn't support dynamic allocation then you're not going to be including jemalloc, so binary size shouldn't be a problem.

As for raw pointers, they're exactly as capable as raw pointers in C, though they're deliberately more verbose as well, because even in embedded contexts one should be favoring references over raw pointers, since references are still fully checked for safety even in embedded mode and yet are represented by raw pointers at runtime and hence have zero runtime overhead.