tock VS Rocket

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.

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.

There's Tock (https://www.tockos.org/), which is written in Rust (with sprinkles of assembly).

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

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.

Unfortunately, it increases the code size by 10%. I was looking into this just last week, and can confirm that it's still a problem on the latest version of Rust nightly: https://github.com/tock/tock/pull/1660

I wish we could have frame pointers, because they would make working in embedded land so much easier and more reliable, but a 10% increase in code size just isn't worth it.

TockOS was the first rust RTOS I found. Coincidentally, it has had support for the esp32c3 for over a year now.

At the bottom of the Rocket web site there are a few sponsors listed Kindness.ai, ohne Makler, 1Password, Signal Insight, and Edwin Olback. There are more sponsors on GitHub sponsors page

4. Rocket

If you want something simpler/more minimal, you could use https://rocket.rs/ for the backend and handle the front-end however you want.

I’m the author of https://kellnr.io. When I started working on Kellnr three years ago, https://rocket.rs was “the web framework” to use. Unfortunately, the project seems dead. Before adding more functionality using an unmaintained framework, I want to port Kellnr to https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum.

Or else you could of course just use https://rocket.rs/

Rust is a popular system programming language, known for its robust memory safety features and exceptional performance. While Rust was originally a system programming language, its application has evolved. Now you can see Rust in different app platforms, mobile apps, and of course, in web apps — both in the frontend and backend, with frameworks like Rocket, Axum, and Actix making it even easier to build web applications with Rust.

I've done some research but I have to admit that creating embedded devices is a totally new subject for me, but that is the point of the project - main goal is learning, and creating something is the secondary goal, so please bear with me and my knowledge of the subject. So, for the hardware I've seen many people recommending SMT32 family devices, but I've also read that anything with the Cortex-M processor can be suitable. Need more info on that. OS is a hard choice for me because on one hand I was thinking of Ubuntu Core but the device support is not really that good I think, so other options I've found are Tock and RIOT-OS, and I am gravitating towards the latter because it's main focus is on IOT devices. I've found frameworks like Rocket.rs for a web app, tauri.app for desktop app (which might not be needed but I still like the idea). Also found Tokio.rs which apparently will help with the networking. There was a discussion from the other members about using the Golioth cloud platform with Zephyr and C++, and I don't know if there are any other alternatives for Golioth that support Rust, I've found webthings.io but I am not sure if it's an alternative, or something else actually, so I would be happy to learn more about that. Again I want to hear your recommendations regarding anything that will help creating a project like that.