stm32-rs VS rust

Developing code at the PAC, well, requires a PAC crate for the targeted controller. For the STM32 there exists a repo for all the supported PACs. These PACs are all generated using a command line tool called svd2rust. svd2rust grabs what is called an svd file and converts it into a PAC exposing API allowing access to peripheral registers. An SVD file is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) formatted file describing the hardware features of a device, listing all the peripherals and the registers associated with them. SVD files typically are released by microcontroller manufacturers.

In real world software, 99% of code is gluing preexisting lower-level functions together. In C/C++, the unsafe is implicit and needlessly covers everything. In Rust, the unsafe is only needed for the 1%.

You can safely implement a doubly-linked list in Rust, using unsafe, and that list can offer a safe interface so that the next higher level of code does not need to use unsafe. In fact, one doubly-linked list implementation that provides a safe interface is in the Rust standard library: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.LinkedList.... . Most people do not rewrite std::list in C++ either.

Much of the Linux kernel really is the same: normal C code (maybe slightly more complicate than average userspace code, and definitely more carefully reviewed, but definitely not magic), that depends on extra carefully written lower level primitives that are _much_ more complicated internally than they appear from the outside (like the memory allocator, printk, RCU, etc.).

Rust is powerful enough to have libraries for register level access to micro-controllers (e.g. https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs), that encode moderately complex access rules safely in the type system (e.g. which specific set of bits is read-only or write-only, with which particular values (with nice human-readable names, even!), in which particular states of a state machine depending on other bits), all while allowing bypassing the restrictions with a simple unsafe keyword without even giving up on the nice API.

On the C/C++ side, I've used libopencm3, MBED, CMSIS, and everyone's favorite toy, Arduino. They're, in different ways, all much more mature and complete than anything Rust has today, but nothing comes even remotely close to Rust in terms of safety and long term potential.

Packages: Where would I start with e.g. running Ada on a stm32? Resources are just a bit tough to find, and there's only a single stm32 package on Alire (which was inspired by cargo). But Rust has easy to find PACs and HALs for everything in the family, plus an official guide to setting up a project, including HIL debugging and unit testing on qemu, that takes about 15 minutes.

> (I threw out all my C/C++ books about 15 years ago - oops!).

The future is here for STM32: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs

Specifically these Rust register definitions are being auto-generated using SVD files published by the chip vendors (https://www.keil.com/pack/doc/CMSIS/SVD/html/index.html). For stm32 for example there are the auto-generated register definitions: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs and then the HAL layers on top that try to build easy to use tools on top of the registers (e.g. an SPI or USART type with write and read functions). e.g. https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32f4xx-hal for the stm32f4xx line

For STM32, check out the Peripheral Access Crates by the stm32-rs ream. For higher-level access, I wrote This HAL library for STM32. Works on most newer variants, and includes examples for specific peripherals, and simple applications.

Patches: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs/tree/master/devices

> There are online Rust compilers and interpreters already if you just want to rapid prototype and develop ideas in Rust

You are responding to one of the key developers of Rust early on[1], who's been working with the language for 14 years at that point.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors?from=2... and he's still #16 in commits overall today, despite almost no activity on the rust compiler since 2014.

If you haven't dipped your touch-typing fingers into Rust yet, you really owe it to yourself. Rust is a modern programming language with features that make it suitable not only for systems programming -- its original purpose, but just about any other environment, too; there are frameworks that let your build web services, web applications including user interfaces, software for embedded devices, machine learning solutions, and of course, command-line tools. Since a custom GitHub Action is essentially a command-line tool that interacts with the system through files and environment variables, Rust is perfectly suited for that as well.

Here's an example of someone citing a disagreement between CRT and shell32:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/44650

This in addition to the Rust CVE mentioned elsewhere in the thread which was rooted in this issue:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/04/09/cve-2024-24576.html

Here are some quick programs to test contrasting approaches. I don't have examples of inputs where they parse differently on hand right now, but I know they exist. This was also a problem that was frequently discussed internally when I worked at MSFT.

    #include 

> instead of choosing a certain numbered version of the random library (if I remember correctly) I let cargo download the latest version which had a completely different API.

Yeah, they didn't follow the instructions and got burned. I still think that multiple things went wrong simultaneously for that experience. I wonder if more prevalent uses of `#[doc(alias = "name")]` being leveraged by https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/120730 (which now that I check only accounts for methods and not functions, I should get on that!) so that when changing APIs around people at least get a slightly better experience.

Almost fixed the compiler: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/123325

Rust: A secure, efficient, and modern programming language (omitting ten thousand words). You can simply follow the installation instructions provided on the official website.

Recently did something similar in Rust but for generating SVGs. We've adopted it for snapshot testing of cargo and rustc's output. Don't have a good PR handy for showing Github's rendering of changes in the SVG (text, side-by-side, swiping) but https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/121877/files has newly added SVGs.

To see what is supported, see the screenshot in the docs: https://docs.rs/anstyle-svg/latest/anstyle_svg/

We strongly believe in Rust as a powerful language for building production-grade software, especially for systems like ours that run alongside Kubernetes.