Programming Language

The course suggestion is to program in C (or C++) and use STM32CubeIDE to generate the microcontroller-configuration (setting pins as input/output, setting up I2C, etc.), but this was not a hard requirement.

I chose Rust for the following reasons:

• It is a systems programming language with similar performance to C/C++
• The language offers many memory-safety related features which C & C++ lack
  • There are many companies and projects which have done research on this and come to the conclusion that this can't be solved with C/C++ and are moving towards Rust, e.g.:
    • Linux Kernel 6.1 with Rust Support for Drivers
    • Android: Memory Safe Languages in Android 13
    • Microsoft Security Response Center: Blog Series on Memory Safety
    • Microsoft Azure CTO Statement
    • AWS loves Rust
    • Mozilla is oxidating Firefox
    • Chromium supports Rust
    • Tangram Vision: Why Rust for Robots?
    • tonari: 3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust
• Embedded development is nowadays well-supported in Rust:
  • Active community around it (incl. a working group)
  • thumbv7em-none-eabihf (for our STM32F4 chip) is a tier 2 target for the compiler
  • HAL implementations available for all relevant chips
  • Drivers (target-agnostic, based on embedded-hal traits) exist for a lot of peripherals
  • Frameworks for many common functionalities exist
  • Various RTOS and RTOS-like frameworks exist
• Due to the embedded-hal abstraction most of the code can be written in a device-agnostic manner, making it more portable.
• The language offers many more modern, concise ways of writing code compared to C/C++
• Personal reasons
  • While I had used Rust before, I had never used it for embedded development and wanted to explore this use-case
  • I wanted to show Rust as an alternative to C/C++ for the FHGR