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by Galanwe 2000 days ago
Any chance to see increased support for 8bit AVR in upcoming releases?

I know Rust is community driven, so it's not like contributions will appear from thin air. But I guess maybe it would be time to promote/incentivize people to contribute support for microcontrollers. This is a realm where C reigns and Rust would be a bowl of fresh air.

3 comments

32 bit microcontrollers are well-supported, and often cheaper, more power efficient and with more features than old 8-bit uCs.

https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg

That is true but there are literally millions of AVR based Arduinos out in the world and I can confirm that they are totally usable with Rust.
Maybe, but 8bit MCUs are simple, efficient, have a huge community & resources, and more importantly exist in convenient DIP & SOIC form factors.
Rust has full support for AVR, excluding function pointers due to current LLVM bugs. Building on stable would be nice though, as it currently requires a custom target JSON file.
> Rust has full support for AVR

Last time I checked (6 month ago), the Rust AVR fork had just been merged upstream. This removed the necessity to build a forked rustc from a patched llvm.

I would have to re-check recent updates, but at the time there were still a lot of bugs, no core libs, etc.

That's not what I would call "full support".

Folks are still working on it, yep.

I mean, Rust does have support for many microcontrollers. I do ARM stuff for work, for example. Just not AVR. It'll be nice to have it though!