[tux3]

I think the kernel and microcontroller use-case has been overstated.

A few bare metal projects use stackless coroutines (technically resumable functions) for concurrency, but it has turned out to be a much smaller use-case than anticipated. In practice C and C++ coroutines are really not worth the pain that they are to use, and Rust async has mostly taken off with heavy-duty executors like Tokio that very much don't target tiny #[no-std] 16-bit microcontrollers.

The Kernel actually doesn't use resumable functions for background work, it uses kernel threads. In the wider embedded world threads are also vastly more common than people might think, and the really low-end uniprocessor systems are usually happy to block. Since these tiny systems are not juggling dozens of requests per second that are blocking on I/O, they don't gain that much from coroutines anyways.

We mostly see bigger Rust projects use async when they have to handle concurrent requests that block on IO (network, FS, etc), and we mostly observe that the ecosystem is converging on tokio.

Threads are not free, but most embedded projects today that process requests in parallel — including the kernel — are already using them. Eager futures are more expensive than lazy futures, and less expensive than threads. They strike an interesting middle ground.

Lazy futures are extremely cheap at runtime. But we're paying a huge complexity cost in exchange that benefits a very small user-base than hasn't really fully materialized as we hoped it would.

[kibwen]

> it has turned out to be a much smaller use-case than anticipated

Well, no, at the time of the design of Rust's async MVP, everyone was pretty well aware that the vast majority of the users would be writing webservers, and that the embedded use case would be a decided minority, if it ever existed at all. That Embassy exists and its ecosystem as vibrant as it is is, if anything, an unexpected triumph.

But regardless of how many people were actually expected to use it in practice, the underlying philosophy remained thus: there exist no features of Rust-the-language that are incompatible with no_std environments (e.g. Rust goes well out of its way, and introduces a lot of complexity, to make things like closures work given such constraints), and it would be exceptional and unprecedented for Rust to violate this principle when it comes to async.

[tux3]

Point taken, I might have formed the wrong impression at the time.

With my C++ background, I'm very much at home with that philosophy, but I think there is room for nuance in how strictly orthodox we are.

C++ does have optional language features that introduce some often unwelcone runtime overhead, like RTTI and unwinding.

Rust does not come configured for freestanding environments out of the box either. Like C++, you are opting out of language features like unwinding as well as the standard library when going freestanding.

I want to affirm that I'm convinced Rust is great for embedded. It's more that I mostly love async when I get to use it for background I/O with a full fledged work stealing thread-per-core marvel of engineering like tokio!

In freestanding Rust the I/O code is platform specific, suddenly I'd have to write the low-level async code myself, and it's not clear this makes the typical embedded project that much higher performance, or all that easy to maintain.

So, I don't want to say anything too radical. But I think the philosophy doesn't have to be as clear cut as no language feature ever incompatible with no-std. Offering a std only language feature is not necessarily closing a door to embedded. We sort of already make opt-out concessions to have a friendlier experience for most people.

(Apologies for the wall of text)