[arcticbull]

The borrow checker isn't nearly as big a deal as you make it out to be from a complexity perspective. You have to take some time to learn the paradigm but when you do it's easy. The challenge is people assume it writes like C because it looks like C, and are frustrated when it doesn't. After a couple of months, you'll realize the borrow checker is your friend, you just need to feed it stuff in a way it understands.

The borrow checker is great for all sorts of things, like ensuring that you only have a single mutable reference or an arbitrary number of immutable references to objects (to prevent corruption) and for the pseudo-threaded model interrupts entail. Memory safety matters in embedded systems, too. You can encode state cleanly with ADT enums [2] where the language can statically detect invalid state transitions.

It's also a much more expressive language, providing you with great abstractions with no added cost. The ergonomics are pretty great compared to dealing with C once your peripherals / register accesses are wrapped, as often are already. For instance, check out the stm32 package [1].

Being able to rely on the compiler more means you get correct code faster, and debugging on embedded systems can be absolute hell. Anything that helps me avoid it is a massive win in my books.

[1] https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs

[2] https://hoverbear.org/2016/10/12/rust-state-machine-pattern/