smoltcp VS tock

Compare smoltcp vs tock and see what are their differences.

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smoltcp tock
10 34
3,898 5,610
1.3% 1.3%
8.7 9.9
10 days ago 7 days ago
Rust Rust
BSD Zero Clause License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

smoltcp

Posts with mentions or reviews of smoltcp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-09-05.

tock

Posts with mentions or reviews of tock. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-27.
  • Pebble smartwatch firmware released as open-source
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2025
    TL;DR: No. Maybe? Depends.

    It's probably reasonable to make a distinction between "Real Time" desktop/server OS (on CPUs) vs "Real Time" embedded hardware OS (on MCUs).

    (Even aside from any hard-/soft- real time distinction.)

    On the embedded side, in addition to FreeRTOS (upon which Pebble OS is built), I'm aware of others with reasonably high profile such as:

    * Zephyr (Linux Foundation, C): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(operating_system)

    * NuttX (Apache Software Foundation, C & C++): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuttX

    In addition, there's also some "up & coming" Rust language projects which fall somewhere along the "framework" to "OS" spectrum (in part, via https://arewertosyet.com):

    * Tock: https://github.com/tock/tock

    * Embassy: https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy

    * Hubris: https://hubris.oxide.computer

    On the desktop side, I seem to recall in the past, OS such as BeOS & QNX have been presented as a possible future for real time desktop OS that hasn't arrived.

    As someone else already mentioned, PREEMPT_RT being merged for Linux is a recent development somewhat in this space which could have impact on both desktop & "embedded" situations but suitability varies dependent on, say, whether you're wanting to use it for audio production versus controlling some 10 tonne robot operating next to humans.

    Hope this at least goes some way to answering your question. :)

  • A secure embedded operating system for microcontrollers
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jun 2024
  • OxidOS Automotive
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2024
    Hi! This is Daniel from OxidOS Automotive (stating this for disclaimer purposes).

    Yes, our OS is based on TockOS, and our CEO (Alex Radovici) is #7 in the contributors list (https://github.com/tock/tock/graphs/contributors), with other colleagues contributing in the past years.

  • What is the best library to write a SCADA-like application for web?
    4 projects | /r/rust | 11 Dec 2023
  • Safety vs. Performance. A case study of C, C++ and Rust sort implementations
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2023
    I'm definitely not the best person to answer this, but honestly it's not bad. Here's an example of a moderately complex peripheral, the cortex-m MPU, and how one rust OS handles it:

    https://github.com/tock/tock/blob/3a0527d586702b8ae8cb242391...

    Reads and writes turn into volatile reads, so everything works out under the hood. You get the benefits of everything having good names, declared sizes, and proper typing on your register accesses. You can extend that to bit accesses as well.

    Rust still has a few areas it isn't competitive in, like your hyper limited or obscure chips (e.g. 8051s, XAP), mature tooling around formal methods, and a certification story for safety critical code. People are working on these latter two issues (e.g. ferrocene) and supposedly very close to public delivery, but you know how slow the industry is to adopt new things even then.

  • Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jul 2023
  • Real-Time Operating Systems 101: Basics for Efficient Computing
    1 project | /r/embedded | 25 May 2023
    There's Tock (https://www.tockos.org/), which is written in Rust (with sprinkles of assembly).
  • Unwinding the Stack the Hard Way
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Apr 2023
    Yeah, and I like I mentioned in the earlier comment, omitting the frame pointer reduces code size by 10% on RISC-V targets, which is huge when dealing with embedded flash: https://github.com/tock/tock/pull/1660
  • Where are the C Alternatives?
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 2 Apr 2023
  • Embedded real time OS
    2 projects | /r/rust | 1 Apr 2023
    Tock is an excellent embedded OS written in Rust and has some good industrial support. I think Tock gets a lot of stuff right and I highly recommend some of the talks the developers gave on it.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing smoltcp and tock you can also consider the following projects:

mosys

embassy - Modern embedded framework, using Rust and async.

rtic - Real-Time Interrupt-driven Concurrency (RTIC) framework for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers

rust-raspberrypi-OS-tutorials - :books: Learn to write an embedded OS in Rust :crab:

OpenSK - OpenSK is an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.

redox - Mirror of https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox

buildroot - Buildroot, making embedded Linux easy. Note that this is not the official repository, but only a mirror. The official Git repository is at https://gitlab.com/buildroot.org/buildroot/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.

awesome-embedded-rust - Curated list of resources for Embedded and Low-level development in the Rust programming language

headcrab - A modern Rust debugging library 🦀

hubris - A lightweight, memory-protected, message-passing kernel for deeply embedded systems.

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