I get the sense they weren't talking about what most people mean when they say "steep entry" in a Rust context (i.e. the language itself), but specifically its support and documentation for the embedded case

I jumped into embedded C and had working firmware in a couple of days. Of course I knew C but I am no expert and there was like 10 years since I've used it last time and that last time was not a firmware.

Rust has been my goto language for several years for multiple projects, was a primary language at a certain point not too long ago for what it's worth. Generally depends on your background. Rust in general suffers from one... I guess you can call it disease: evangelists. Many people are convinced that it is the best language for any purpose and you'll never need anything else(something which can be seen in the js and java community and we know the outcome of that). To quote a guy I used to work with: "The perfect web stack is actix + rust wasm. You can't possibly need anything else". Uuugh... Yeah... Sorry, no.

It's definitely a language you can't learn overnight so don't overdo it - it takes time to wrap your head around many of the concepts. While I admit I am a fanboy, I also openly admit that it's not suitable for every purpose. Most certainly not for web development - yes it is fast, yes actix can boost some astonishing benchmarks but truth is it hardly pays off to put in so much effort, especially when you are working on a schedule. It's a question of trade-offs. People address many async-await logical blocks by slapping Arc<RwLock<T>> or Arc<Mutex<T>> everywhere and a ton of read and write locks to get around it. Which if perfectly acceptable if you don't overdo it. Otherwise you will have to spend endless hours trying to catch some lock somewhere which is biting your head. Hence the reason why I'd really avoid it for large and complex web services for instance. There are other areas where it's perfect. Three personal projects I'm working on(which I'll hopefully get to open source over the next 6-8 months) and where I don't regret picking rust:

* Raspberry-pi powered CNC router(though dealing with gcode is a huge pain in the ass).

* Distributed full-text search engine(similar to elasticsearch).

* Automated image pulling from NOAA satellites with an SDR dongle(though in this particular instance I'm taking a shortcut by piggybacking on librtlsdr).

As far as embedded rust. First is what I mentioned earlier - setting up a development environment is an absolute hell, and far not only the first time. You have to go through the same steps each time. At this point I'm somewhat used to it and I can unpack an embedded board and get it going in say 20-30 minutes(having the spec sheet at bay is a must). It also takes an additional layer of tweaking your brain: it takes some time to get used to things such as #![deny(unsafe_code)], #![no_main], #![no_std] and #[entry]. It's nothing like arduinos if you've worked with those, where you plug in the board, open the arduino IDE, select the board model and port and hit "upload".

My experience with getting started with any embedded system, even if I am programming in C, is that it will have a steep learning curve unless someone in the community already went through this and published a how-to.

Thanks for the explanation. I’m planning to go through this book with the recommended hardware. Hopefully, it’s more guided than what you’ve experienced: https://docs.rust-embedded.org/discovery/microbit/