This is great! I've been thinking about doing something like this with Rust for a while. Anybody have experience using Zinc.rs[0] in a similar capacity?
[0] https://zinc.rs/
[0] https://zinc.rs/
If I'm not wrong, it will be merged with the official version soon.
I have been working with Matt Coffin some on getting this working. Feel free to increase its chances of merging by helping us test any of the supported boards (Freescale K20, NXP LPC17xx, SAM3x (on a branch), STM32F4, STM32l1, TI Tiva C).
I plan on putting together an RFC for how we can modify zinc (or provide documentation) to make it easier for individuals to create both libraries and projects that work well with zinc, but do not require modifying zinc itself.
The Due has 512KB of room for code which is quite a lot (for microcontrollers).
See: http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2015/01/151-byte-...
The end of the market with tiny micros and extremely simple applications (like just blinking LEDs) is likely to never be well suited to Rust, but doesn't gain much from it anyway.
* I don't think a few tens of bytes is realistic for a real application that needs to set up the stack, timers, and then blink some LEDs (https://github.com/mcoffin/zinc/blob/new-build/examples/app_... / https://github.com/mcoffin/zinc/blob/new-build/examples/app_...)
* Assuming the code size overhead does not continue to bloat after some initial overhead, I think rust can still be very competitive. Although modern embedded systems are still very constrained, the days of 8-bit micros are basically over. You can buy a 32-bit ARM micro for nearly the same cost with sufficient RAM/Flash to run rust well.
* Looking back, I think the size of blink should actually be closer to 600 bytes. Will need to investigate: http://zinc.rs/stats/