Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MarkMarine 1258 days ago
I use it at work, and while it’s quite good, I find some of the ESP libraries on top of FreeRTOS to actually be a step backwards. As soon as esp adds their event loop, you’re pushed towards using that architecture, and while I’ve found that good for single use devices, for devices that are doing multiple things at the same time, fitting in memory has been a chore. I also would love some higher performance networking with zero copy, most of the interface boundaries in the esp code involve a memory copy.
1 comments
MrBuddyCasino 1258 days ago
Yes its easy to use but a bit wasteful. I suspect that the innovative stuff will come from the Rust side of things, with zero copy, shared stack etc. They are actively funding efforts here [0]. The RTIC [1] project looks really neat, but only supports Cortex-M afaik.

[0] https://github.com/esp-rs

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

link
MarkMarine 1258 days ago
I’m really really pumped about the rust stack, for two big reasons.

1. The innovation and performance you’re talking about.

2. Hiring. We’re going to be able to be on a flashy language, doing something cool which isn’t always the case with embedded. We’ve had a hell of a time getting candidates in that could write low level code competently. Rust should make that easier and hopefully using it will make us more attractive to the small pool of devs we’re courting.

link
MrBuddyCasino 1258 days ago
My impression is that a certain kind of people find the challenges of embedded work attractive, but leave it sooner or later since the pay is not competitive with generic (but more boring) webdev. I guess this is due to the nature of thin margins in manufacturing hardware?
link
MarkMarine 1257 days ago
Depends what you’re building and where I guess. I didn’t get a pay cut moving from BE distributed services to embedded.
link
ilyt 1258 days ago
I did a bit of RTIC and can confirm it's pretty pleasurable to work with. It's sort of almost-RTOS, just enough to get some concurrency going without going full-on OS. It also cleverly uses unused ARM interrupts to act as sorta hardware accelerated context switches
link
bfrog 1258 days ago
That wouldn't be entirely surprising!
link