rust VS heapless

For what it's worth, this is the script I'm using to build for our platform: build.ps1 / build.sh

Note that before I got the target triple upstream, I had to provide my own target json file. That's here: https://github.com/betrusted-io/rust/blob/1.53.0-xous/riscv32imac-unknown-xous-elf.json and you can adapt it as necessary. Simply creating the file in the correct path is enough. This is the code that does that: https://github.com/betrusted-io/rust/blob/e39344c5473d49a0cb4d45de119ad23713a00ed4/rebuild.ps1#L65

Everything you need to know to build for our platform is at https://github.com/betrusted-io/rust/ and maybe the scripts or patches there will be interesting to you.

Rust does use a Rust port of dlmalloc on platforms that don't provide malloc() and free(). We did port this to Xous, but ran into a feature bug that caused locking to be disabled. That was the source of weird and subtle bugs, which is how he discovered that fact about allocators.

This is correct.

When you tell someone to install Rust, they go to rustup.rs and install the latest version. Therefore, we need to have a libstd port for the latest version. Which effectively means we need to release libstd as soon as possible after the compiler is released. Our `sys` directory is at https://github.com/betrusted-io/rust/tree/1.61.0-xous/librar... and isn't too complicated. It's about 50 patches that need to be carried forward every six weeks.

Fortunately libstd doesn't change too much, at leaset not the parts we need. And I can usually pre-port the patches by applying them to `beta`, which means the patches against the release version usually apply cleanly.

It's still better than requiring nightly, which has absolutely no stability guarantees. By targeting stable, we don't run into issues of bitrot where we accidentally rely on features that have been removed. Rather than adjusting every service in the operating system, we just need to port one library: libstd

I've considered trying to upstream these, but I'm not sure how the rust team would feel about it.

> we did not have Vec because we were no-std + stable so we literally had to use arrays

It's true that Vec isn't available in a no-std context, but don't think it follows that arrays are the only other option - see heapless for one example: https://github.com/japaric/heapless

I also agree with some of the ancestors: the post seems to say that the Rust language couldn't handle arrays with more than 32 elements, and (as someone who's written a fair bit of no-std Rust before const generic) that doesn't seem right. At first, this did seem awkward to me as well, but in practice I haven't found it to be a significant limitation. Was there a particular scenario where it wasn't feasible to wrap a >32 element array in your own type and implement Default on it?

It's happening

heapless has both SPSC and MPMC channels that work on embedded