tock VS MIO

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.

Was playing around with mio (https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio) (not that mio itself is very important here!) and was trying to implement a simple something that I've done in java before: a Reactor that you can register ReactorClients with that will get callback whenever there are events on the corresponding socket etc.

How does it compare to mio?

TcpStream gets its wake behavior by delegating to the fd wakers. The Unix wakers have a few implementations, for different platforms. On Linux and Android, epoll is used.

The real implementation details of the I/O event queue is done in mio as u/hniksic pointed out, but that's more comparable with libuv which is certainly a huge part of the Node runtime. mio and libuv have a lot of similarities (at least they used to).

My example was "twice by one developer", not "twice across all indexed repos."

A spot check shows that quite a few in your link are used specifically to ensure correct handling of Rust multi-level breaks work syntax, like https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/blob/master/crate... , https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/blob/master/tests/sourc... , https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/tools/rust... , https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/tools/rust... and likely more.

Another is a translation of BASIC code to Rust, using break as a form of goto. https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/blob/e...

The example at https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/master/tests/tcp.rs is a nice one

    // Wait for our TCP stream to connect

In my program, I have about 6 different components that follow the pattern below. Basically, the components run a thread while polling on crossbeam channels, file descriptors or sockets. For polling, I am using Mio (https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio).

On the code side it's pretty much the same as C++. You have a module that defines an interface and per-platform implementations that are included depending on a "configuration conditional checks" #[cfg(target_os = "linux")] macro.

https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/c6b5f13adf67483d927b176...

Made possible by Wasi support for Mio https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/pull/1576

Indeed! In practice it's done through the polling operation: instead of a separate poll for op1 and op2, the program essentially tells the OS "wake me when either op1 or op2 is ready" (through the epoll syscall on Linux). The mio crate implements this, and the example on the readme is basically the same loop, but written with this polling strategy in mind.