tock VS embassy

Compare tock vs embassy and see what are their differences.

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tock embassy
34 82
5,640 6,230
1.9% 6.6%
9.9 9.9
1 day ago 4 days ago
Rust Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
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.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
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.

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.

embassy

Posts with mentions or reviews of embassy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-27.
  • Rust async framework for embedded systems
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Feb 2025
  • 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. :)

  • Embassy: Replacing RTOS with a Rust async scheduler
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2024
  • Apple is Killing Swift – A great language strangled by governance
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2024
    The other comment implied it but I think it's worth pointing out that:

    > embedded applications that can't have asynchronous execution

    Is most definitely not the case.

    They can't have the same type of async runtime that would be optimal for a web server or the likes (and I'm not sure all desktop applications and web servers are going to always benefit from the same runtime in the same way), but that's a point in favour of Rust's model imho

    If you're interested this is an embedded async runtime that's expected to run in no-std and no-alloc environments

    https://embassy.dev/

  • Impl Snake For Micro:bit - Embedded async Rust on BBC Micro:bit with Embassy
    6 projects | dev.to | 28 Oct 2024
    In this article, I will guide you through creating a Snake game in embedded Rust on the BBC Micro:bit using the asynchronous framework Embassy.
  • A review after using Rust on embedded in production for over a year
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2024
    Rust solved this by autogenning code from mfgr published device xml descriptors. Eg https://embassy.dev/

    Better than any C(++) embedded hal I've used

  • Building a GATT Server on Pi Pico W
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Aug 2024
  • Embassy-rs/embassy: Modern embedded framework, using Rust and async
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jul 2024
  • Embedded Swift [video]
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jun 2024
  • I like the RP2040
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jun 2024
    If I get your question right, you still need some host software (like a rust compiler)! It's not exactly micropython experience.

    The bare minimum would be one of the examples [1] compiled with a Rust compiler and then transformed into a .uf2 file with elf2uf2 [2]. You can then just drag and drop the .uf2 file into the "mass storage device" presented by the bootloader. To get the bootloader to mount, you press a button on a Raspberry Pico (or short two outputs if you're using bare RP2040) while plugging it in.

    You'll probably want a debug probe [3] driven by probe-rs [4] at some point, it's just much more convenient to flash and debug with it.

    [1]: https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy/tree/main/examples/rp/...

    [2]: https://github.com/JoNil/elf2uf2-rs

    [3]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/d...

    [4]: https://probe.rs/

What are some alternatives?

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

smoltcp - a smol tcp/ip stack

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

nrf-hal - A Rust HAL for the nRF family of devices

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

crates.io - The Rust package registry

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

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

rusty-clock - An alarm clock with environment stats in pure bare metal embedded rust

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

async-std - Async version of the Rust standard library

Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
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