Pragmatic Bare Metal Rust
In this technical retrospective (2015), @jakobdabo shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 138 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 33 comments
Very cool, thanks for sharing the info on using rust bare metal!
I'm really curious to try running rust code on the popular ESP8266 module (http://makezine.com/2015/04/01/esp8266-5-microcontroller-wi-fi-now-arduino-compatible/ ↗ and http://www.esp8266.com/ ↗), but I think the board's xtensa architecture and LLVM's lack of support for it means its a non-starter. If anyone is a LLVM guru, is there any hope of compiling code for xtensa architecture and ABI? Or is there any crazy way to get LLVM to compile rust into plain old C code that can then be compiled with the modified GCC toolchain that supports the ESP8266's xtensa architecture?
This is awesome, surprised the author isn't using libopencm3[1] rather than ST Micro's pretty horrendous library. But the awesome thing is that between this and Zinc I expect there will be a lot of interest in Rust on "high end" embedded platforms.
[1] Disclosure I contribute to that repo when allowed to :-)
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/ ↗
This could be big in safety-critical firmware business.
Some utility to assist bulk conversion from C to Rust would be nice. That way Rust-based firmware could be reality in 2025. :-)
We really need a less ambiguous phrase than bare metal for this, because searching for "Bare Metal Rust" really isn't going to get you the results you want here.