cargo-zigbuild VS probe-rs

https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild

I’m curious what the blockers are for rustc to cross-compile like zig does natively.

Perhaps you can try cargo-zigbuild, it uses zig-cc for cross-compilation instead of creating a container, so it should be much more lightweight on MacOS, without all the cost of virtualization and file sharing.

I have tried, however I haven't been able to get it to work reliably (e.g. building on windows + linux on WSL works, Mac is a lot more involved; tried building for windows + linux on Mac and I couldn't get it to work at all); I've had some luck using zigbuild but that too doesn't seem to work for Mac.

Zig also takes this approach, and even exposes its C compiler (which if I recall correctly is basically Clang plus diverse sysroots and other customisation out of the box) as a separate `zig cc`.

I do a lot of work in Rust, and cross-compilation can be a pain when you have a lot of C dependencies. Fortunately https://github.com/messense/cargo-zigbuild exists. It sounds crazy, but using Zig's inbuilt C compiler to help build my Rust projects has been the smoothest option I've found.

I can't help but wonder if it would be worth it for Rust to follow D and Zig by shipping its own inbuilt C compiler, even if they still want to also support external C toolchains. It should be roughly the same effort as it was for Zig, given that they both use LLVM.

Wait until you start using cargo zig-build. Suddenly it becomes way better than Go's cross compiler because you can seamlessly cross-compile rust AND C (thanks to Zig compiler of course). https://github.com/messense/cargo-zigbuild

Want debugging capabilities with anything with an am st link/jtag/other compatible probe? https://probe.rs/

/uj The SVG usage looks to be in a visualisation helper. Maybe ought to be a separate module, but I've seen worse.

There is a command to list supported chips for *flashing* in all our CLI tools. Furthermore https://github.com/probe-rs/probe-rs/tree/master/probe-rs/targets contains all targets for which we support *flashing*.

Under the hood, cargo-embed, knurling's probe-run, and Humility are all built atop probe-rs (https://probe.rs/) to provide debugging - I think in this case it's actually a great example of cooperation between projects! Probe-rs has received PRs from both Knurling and Oxide devs; it provides the common interface to use various types of debug hardware and talk to various types of microcontroller cores, essentially replacing OpenOCD.

Ryzen 3700X, 3200Mhz DDR4 tower builds http://probe.rs in 1m47s with fans fully spinning. M1 Pro: zero noise, 1m21s. Ryzen 3950X is on par with the M1 Pro. Actual speed difference will very much depend on your actual workload. Compiling for aarch64 apparently is more efficient than for amd64. Which is why compiling for you locally gives much more speed benefit than some generic benchmarks would indicate :) Also, you cannot forget that I can easily work for 10hrs on my MBP M1 Pro with rust-analyzer and frequent compiles running. You can forget that with any other suggested "on par" notebook. They will drain your battery instantly. Also, with the same thermal mass, other laptop builds will go into throttling much faster, which will lead to slower effective speed. XPS laptops and old macbooks know this issue very well :)

Anyone who fancies doing some coding for fun should have a go at an embedded project using rust's tools. Not just embassy, but the PACs, the HALs, probe-rs (probe-rs is bonkers good), and the community on matrix. My bet is on rust embedded seeing huge growth in the next few years.

probe-rs (embedded debugging toolkit for ARM and RISC-V which is supposed to be used in place of the above if you code with it as it aims to fully replace the GDB portion of the stack for Rust embedded development)

cargo install --git https://github.com/probe-rs/probe-rs probe-rs-debugger