[jwr]

Exactly. In most embedded contexts you have CPUs which are overpowered for what you need. What matters is code size, because flash memory is really expensive and the quality of your tools.

Also, once you go beyond blinking a couple of LEDs and especially if you care about energy consumption, you quickly get mired in complexity, dealing with interrupts and resulting concurrency. If you're a seasoned embedded developer, you will have an explicit, mostly declarative state machine at this point, possibly nested, and if you have more than 15 years of experience, you will be seriously thinking about better representations and generating all that C code from a Lisp.

I'm have a lot of hope for Rust in the embedded world. I especially hope that it will get embraced by vendors. To take a practical example again, I'm thinking about Nordic Semiconductor, which has really good SDKs and is innovative.