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by jnbiche 4683 days ago
This is great -- I'm very pleased to see a challenger to C/++ step up in this space. And I'm starting to get really interested in Rust. It would be great to have a safer language to use in the place of C/++, particularly since the world seems to have decided to disregard Ada.

That said, it's important to note that this is not Rust on an AVR Arduino -- it's the Due, which sports an Arm Cortex M3. Targeting AVR which probably be much more difficult (at least that's what I've read). So you won't be able to get this running on your Uno.
2 comments
jensnockert 4683 days ago
LLVM doesn't target the AVR processors, and while there is a avr-llvm backend, I think it is still very early in the development cycle. It is quite possible that you could get it to work with some effort, but it is a lot more complex than targeting an ARM microcontroller.

With awesome boards like the Teensy 3.0 (Cortex M4, http://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy3.html) available on the cheap, not being on AVR isn't the huge disadvantage it once was. At least if you don't count the hardware people already have.

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jnbiche 4683 days ago
I agree, there's are some awesome Arm Cortex chips out on the market now, for not much money at all. And I agree it's not a huge disadvantage not being on AVR, I just wanted to make the point that Rust doesn't run on traditional Arduinos, since that's what most people would assume reading the headline.
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nileshtrivedi 4683 days ago
Texas Instruments practically gives away their development boards. Here is their Stellaris Launchpad board with ARM Cortex-M4F-based MCU for just 8$! Much cheaper than even AVR arduinos! https://estore.ti.com/Stellaris-LaunchPad.aspx

What's more, these days you can even use the Arduino IDE for development on these boards. The Energia project has ported Wiring and Arduino IDE for TI boards. If I wasn't such a minimalist, I would get one (or two) in a heartbeat!

Edited: Forgot to paste the link.

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mindslight 4682 days ago
The TI offerings look geared towards low power and are kind of anemic on the high end with up to only 32kB ram and 256kB flash. ST/NXP/Atmel have parts with over four times that (and the ST eval board is also only $15). I know you can do a lot with a little (I used to design with pic16), but for higher level languages without runtimes optimized for embedded (eg rust), I'd want all the room I could get.
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pjmlp 4683 days ago
MikroElektronika Embedded Solutions also sells Basic and Pascal compilers for embedded development.

http://www.mikroe.com/

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