I've used Rust on a variety of ARM Cortex-M based microcontrollers including Atmel SAMD21, NXP LPC1830, and STM32F4. AVR is tougher because that's an 8-bit architecture with very new support in LLVM.

On microcontrollers, you use libcore instead of the full libstd, for lack of an OS or memory allocator. Libcore is easy to cross compile because it has no dependencies. You provide a target JSON file to specify LLVM options, and a C toolchain to use as a linker, and nightly rustc can cross-compile for platforms supported by LLVM.

https://github.com/hackndev/zinc is a good starting point.

Things like interrupt handlers and statically-allocated global data require big chunks of unsafe code. Rust has a promising future in this space, but it will take more experimentation to get the right abstractions to make microcontroller code more idiomatic.

> I've used Rust on a variety of ARM Cortex-M based microcontrollers including Atmel SAMD21, NXP LPC1830, and STM32F4

That's an encouraging start.

Having been there, and as reported on weekly basis by numerous people like @internetofshit, much of the code that runs the current IoT hype is utter and complete tripe. I have a faint hope that Rust could be something to help in that regard, even though at the same time I recognize that much of the badness in IoT has to do with financial considerations (too costly to make a good quality talking coffee-maker). Maybe it's especially because IoT seems to be all about getting cheap stuff out cheaply, I have this hope that at least having the language and development ecosystem help devs instead of shooting them in their foots would be a good start.

How does programming a "modern" 8 bit architecture work anyway? Do you have 16bit longs? 32bit long longs?

For 8 bit platforms, 8 bits are still bytes/sbytes. Most of them have native functions that work on 16 bit integers, they just take up a pair of registers. You have access to the same array of integer sizes. Plain int is 16 bits, and longs are 32 bits and long longs still 64. Still, I much prefer using the int definitions included in C99, where you define the bit size explicitly. uint16_t is a lot more explicit than int, especially if you've got code that's being shared between a few different micros of different word sizes.

On AVR 8 bit microcontrollers, at least: yes. Pointers are 16 bits, and there are a handful of instructions specifically for 16 bit integer and pointer operations (which operate on pairs of 8 bit registers). For everything else, operations are performed by chaining together 8 bit operations. Adding two 32 bit ints for example would need 4 add instructions.

Thanks! That helps a lot. I'll pickup a dev board for one of those ARM MCUs and look into Zinc.

Last time I looked at this, it seems the number of supported microcontroller are limited. It is usually depends whether llvm supports it or not.

I was wondering if the Rust front end of llvm can be ported to other compiler engines. That could open up the number microcontrollers supported quite quickly.

relatedly, poke around http://masterq.metasepi-design.com/ - he's doing some interesting work with microcontroller programming in ats.