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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what would be required to get Rust running on the ESP32 boards? I picked up a couple for $6 each (Wemos LoLin32), and it's an impressive board for the price. Wifi and bluetooth built in.

I assume it's non-trivial or someone would have done it already, but I'm curious if it might happen eventually. Been poking at C which is already a bit out of my wheelhouse, but it'd be a good excuse to check out Rust too if I could.

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There's been some experimentation with using https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc to target the ESP8266: https://github.com/emosenkis/arduino-esp-rs

The same would work for the ESP32.

I don't know about Rust, but MicroPython runs quite well on the ESP8266/ESP32 boards. Might be worth investigating if you're looking for something a bit more accessible than C.

https://github.com/micropython/micropython-esp32

Or this one for the Wrover: https://github.com/loboris/MicroPython_ESP32_psRAM_LoBo

MicroPython kind of misses the point in this case though. The desire for Rust is for something not only safer and higher level but also fast and low on memory usage. Rust on the esp32 with Rusty bindings to esp-idf would be fantastic.

I'm sure I'd be more productive in MicroPython, but I'm using it more as a fun excuse to pick up a lower level language than anything else.

I agree that the ESP32 would be a really cool way to get some practical experience with Rust.

If you want to get started more easily take a look at Neil Kolban's book on the ESP32.[1] Other environments besides C include C simplified with the Arduino IDE, Python, Lua, and JavaScript.

[1] https://leanpub.com/kolban-ESP32

If you're looking to make a commercial application with the ESP32 or ESP8266, I'd say bit the bullet and learn C. The Espressif SDKs are pretty decent.

I'm making a commercial product with the ESP8266 with the FreeRTOS SDK, and it's been relatively painless so far.

I've recently bit the bullet started porting my CPP Arduino code to C to run on ESP32's and take advantage of some of the more advanced features, watchdogs and freeRTOS tasks.

I would much prefer to write the code in Rust but I'm sure even if it were possible and I got it all working eventually some other chip will be the new hotness and using C ensures I need to do the least amount of work to get it working on that chip

Did you take a look on chibios?

Given that ESP32 is already a bit better than an Amstrad PCW 1512, it would be nice to have other options as well.

MS-DOS had lots of programming language options.

There isn't any LLVM support yet, and it doesn't look like anyone's working on it.

I heard that Expressif was working on an LLVM port, but we'll see...

That has died. Every now and then I'm thinking this might be a fun project, but... well.

You could try and compile with the resurrected LLVM c backend, llvm-cbe, and then compile that C code with existing tools. Good luck debugging that mess if you ever need that, but Rust has compile time safety, right? ;)

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