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by DoingIsLearning 1638 days ago
It's great to see a community forming and the general enthusiasm.

But are there any vendors actively participating in or supporting Embedded Rust?

For example is any vendor porting drivers to native Rust?

4 comments

Espressif (the makers of the hugely popular ESP32/ESP8266/... microcontrollers) hired an embedded Rust community member to work full time on Rust support for their chips: https://mabez.dev/blog/posts/esp-rust-espressif/
Does Espressif have large marketshare outside of hobbyists?
The ESP chips are in pretty much all cheap Chinese-made IoT and Smart Home devices.
There's at least a decent amount of interest from both industry (auto tier 1's, for example) and from vendors; I'd love to name names here but I'm pretty sure I can't. :)
> But are there any vendors actively participating in or supporting Embedded Rust?

That's kind of an interesting question.

While obviously vendor participation can lead to some positive outcomes; my impression is some part of the motivation for Rust targeting the embedded space (and not waiting on vendors) is to avoid reliance on hardware vendors.

Due largely to the poor reputation hardware vendors have in regard to anything in the software tool/firmware space within the C ecosystem.

In addition to what others have said, ARM has participated in the RFC process, donated CI resources, and joined the Rust Foundation.

There are also a large number of things going on in industry that aren’t yet truly public. Some of these are the “I know something I can’t say” variety and some are the variety of “wow another car manufacturer has posted an embedded Rust job?”

Exiting times ahead.