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> But the problem with that is that the market that really really
> can't use GC is vanishingly tiny. It's huge, but specialized so may not be on your radar: small embedded devices. Think RAM size from 10s to 100s kB, and Flash from 100s kB to few MBs as rough ranges. The interest for IoT, and the need for battery operated devices with lifetime of 10+ years, make such platforms very important. And cost and process constraints (like embedded Flash) lead them to be implemented in conservative nodes: 55 to 40 nm typical, will go to 28nm in time but unlikely to go lower. So the amount of processing won't change much in this space I believe. An any gain would not be used to get a bigger CPU/RAM, but to reduce cost and power (less power is smaller batteries => cost too). So this space will stay on the very small side for the foreseeable future. These are devices that run on very small micro-controller cores and are too small even for a striped down embedded Linux distro. It's either RTOS, or even simple run-to-completion preemptive schedulers, or even bare metal. No room for GC here, and Rust with its focus on performance, leanness and safety is very well suited as a language. As a platform, the fact that there's only one LLVM based compiler for Rust is a limitation in this space. In the deep embedded space there are a lot of architectures for which there's no LLVM support (Cortus, Andes, BA Semi, LM32, Nios, ...). But I hope this as temporary. GCC is the most common toolchain there, and hopefully at one point GCC will gain a Rust front end. Or maybe LLVM will become more popular in this area? We'll see. |
True, if you're talking about tiny embedded systems where you would not use GC (nor any dynamic allocation), you shouldn't have much difficulty using Rust. Nor many of its benefits.