Post

Facts

Also the fact you can often generate a skeleton hal layer from an svd spec.

How easy is rust for those of us who aren’t in tech? My brain is so fried from using stats software pretty much exclusively that I had to install pycharm again to debug a simple py script I wrote

It's complicated. 1) rust has lovely pycharm style interfaces to all the cool user friendly stuff rust does 2) rust is a systems programming language and is at least as hard as C but the compiler (or IDE linter) will yell at you for writing bad code.

The difficult bits in rust, IMO, are things that are difficult about programming without a memory manager full stop. You have to care about ownership of pointers, you have to care about allocation. It will help you in ways that C-like languages but the language is not the hard part.

This is really helpful, it also tells me I need to maybe stick to scripting languages for now which manage the bulk of that for me (admittedly, quite badly often) I have some time off coming up soon and was thinking of learning a new language and rust was on the “maybe” list.

For sure. Rust is only really useful where you would want to use C or C++. So embedded devices or operating system/driver programming are both great choices or high performance code. But Python is an objectively better tool for hacking out a solution that doesn't need to be small or fast.

I used circuitpython for a quick-and-dirty demo once (BeBox-style CPU utilization strips for all 12 threads on my laptop!) and that convinced me I should just do all my prototyping in rust lol.

what LEDs and MCU bc yeah i can imagine why circuitpython might have fallen over on that task depending

Some ARM chip, arduino-type thing, probably an atmel samd since that's what most of those used. WS2812s (aka NeoPixels) since we had strips of them laying around and you can wire a whole line of them to one pin. This was a quick and dirty demo so it was all laid out on breadboards and cardboard.

I think most people do although I'm working on reversing enough of it to understand how much real estate is taken up by the bytecode interpreter compared with a similar baremetal app.

yeah, the interpreter is *heavy* and function calls are slow as fuck. and the c HAL is basically always also in there, too. so you are at like 3 abstraction layers, and they're not cheap ones.

Makes a big difference for things like replacing meshtastic/core with something vaguely like effective cryptography.