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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea Rust MCU support has come so far, the generated code is indeed very lean. This is fantastic! God I'd love to use this, but ESP8266/ESP32 is where its at right now (at least for me).

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I think Aparicio himself is a decent-sized part of that support.

BTW, regarding ESP8266 [1]

[1] http://hackaday.com/2017/01/04/rust-running-on-the-realtek-r...

++ to japaric driving embedded Rustlang development. He's built a lot of the low-level tooling, and many of the articles/tutorials are form him as well.

Re: RTL8710... That was me! :) I haven't had much chance to continue hacking on the RTL8710 (we just moved, hobbies are still packed away) but I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running.

Especially considering how little I know about embedded development, I imagine someone with more knowledge would be a lot more productive.

I'd say ESP* is 'it' for a very small set of people. The Cortex M cores are significantly more ubiquitous.

I take it Rust is not supported on ESP8266 yet?

Some Espressif guy is said to be working on a backend for LLVM, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Nope, LLVM doesn't have a backend for the Xtensa architecture.

You could potentially go via C. https://github.com/draperlaboratory/llvm-cbe

I suspect you'd be much better off with a Rust MIR -> C compiler. Rust's memory and execution model is much closer to C than C is to LLVM.

The C backend was expelled from LLVM several years ago because it was too buggy and nobody wanted to fix it and since then has hardly been updated. That doesn't seem like a very pleasant route.

IIRC the C backend lags LLVM pretty far. Thankfully, rust tries to be compatible among a few different generations of LLVM, so maybe it's feasible.

Looks dead. No commits for almost 2 years.

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