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> Two teams concurrently developing the same functionality (one in C, one in Rust) are analyzed over a period of several months. A comparative analysis of their approaches, results, and iterative efforts is provided. The analysis and measurements on hardware indicate no strong reason to prefer C over Rust for microcontroller firmware on the basis of memory footprint or execution speed. Furthermore, Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime in Rust whose footprint is smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bare-metal C stack traditionally used in this context. It is concluded that Rust is a sound choice today for firmware development in this domain.
My understand is that both these things are in work, and that neither of these things exist yet.
This conclusion was reached with a single experiment.
> Two teams concurrently developing the same functionality — one in C, one in Rust — are analyzed over a period of several months.
> Furthermore, Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime in Rust whose footprint is smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bare-metal C stack traditionally used in this context.
> The authors thank Davide Aliprandi and Davide Sergi of the STAIoTCraft team, and the wider Ariel OS team.
So one team had Ariel OS developer support, and it's unclear what support the other team had. Seems fair.
In Figure 12, they simply stop optimizing the code once desired rate is reached. Just at the end of the project the Rust firmware gets over a third performance boost, most likely from their OS developers.
Additionally, there is a claim that "Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime" - but there are no real tests for portability are conducted. Worst still:
> Where C-based projects require a separate project setup and manual code copying per target, Rust on Ariel OS consolidates everything within a single project [..]
This claim is just not true. This sounds like somebody that is not as familiar with C.
Yes. The goal was to handle the maximum data rate of the used sensor, and stop there. Time was limited on both ends.
> Just at the end of the project the Rust firmware gets over a third performance boost, most likely from their OS developers.
The ST intern found those boosts all by himself. They compared the exact MCU & peripheral initialization of the C and Rust firmwares, tightened I2C timings (where STM Cube has vendor tuned & qualified values), and enabled the MCU's instruction cache, which somehow is not default in Embassy's HAL. We were quite impressed actually, the last days before the deadline were quite productive, optimization wise.
I understand, and I understand that there were limits to what could be done with the resources there were. What irks me is the strength of the claim made without enough evidence to make it.
> The ST intern found those boosts all by himself. They compared the exact MCU & peripheral initialization of the C and Rust firmwares, tightened I2C timings (where STM Cube has vendor tuned & qualified values), and enabled the MCU's instruction cache, which somehow is not default in Embassy's HAL. We were quite impressed actually, the last days before the deadline were quite productive, optimization wise.
Fair enough, hats off to the intern. This kind of thing is common in MCUs, even on low-end CPUs weird defaults can be selected. But the involvement and influence of the OS developers remains unclear.
Again, there's just not enough data to make such strong claims. I think the paper could easily make recommendations, it could say that at least in some cases (as evidenced) Rust could be a reasonable choice, and it could make an argument for further work.
No shit. This is the conclusion reached at the conclusion of this experiment. This part of your comment can be removed with no loss of clarity, I think.
If I ran an experiment where I gave a cancer patient bread, and then they recovered from cancer, I couldn't then say: "It is concluded that <bread> is a sound choice today for <cancer treatment> in this domain.". You would rightfully jump up and down and demand further experiments to increase the confidence of the result before drawing the conclusion.
It could have been concluded instead that there is a case for further experiments to be conducted, or that Rust could be approaching a maturity where it could be considered for some firmware projects. But as it stands, the conclusion is far too strong given the experiments performed.
I would say however that there's still toolchain issues here. There all kinds of MCUs that simply don't/won't have a viable compiler toolchain that would support Rust.
e.g. I recently came from a job where they built their own camera board around an older platform because it offered a compelling bundle of features (USB peripheral support and MIPI interface mainly). We were stuck with C/C++ as the toolchain there, as there was no reasonable way to make this work with Rust as it was a much older ARM ISA
-> paper is not final. And IIUC ST will be releasing the code at some point.
https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html