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by 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.

1 comments

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.
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.

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.