Raspberry Pi Bare Metal Programming with Rust
In this technical retrospective (2016), @thiagopnts 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 340 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 92 comments
As a C programmer who fiddles with low level stuff I wonder why people get exciting about such trivial thing.
Don't get me wrong. Rust is an interesting language. The thing described in this post is well within its capability, i.e. IMO there isn't really anything that worths bragging about. Such trivial thing neither demonstrates the real potential of Rust, nor answers important questions from real world engineering perspective.
I'm all for having better tool to write low level stuff. I have dabbled with Rust and the experience was eye-opening. I think Rust still have a lot to catch up though.
As a long time C programmer this is not very convincing. A C program to do the same requires far less voodoo. All you need to do is take the address of the GPIO register then toggle the bit. No name mangling. No error handlers to override. Don't get me wrong I know rust does have some compelling features. It does seem odd to me that so many of what would be compiler options in C are hard coded.
I have the perfect project for this! Generate a signal using the GPIO ports to drive a mirror and camera in a synchronized fashion.
Does anyone know if the RPi GPIOs can be driven at around 80KHz? I've seen reports that this is possible, but that the USB or video driver tends to lock the CPU for long times, messing with timings - but hopefully running on bare metal would take care of that.
If you want to play around with the code in this post that requires nightly, multirust makes it much more pleasant to use nightly and / or stable rust.
https://github.com/brson/multirust ↗
I remember reading a couple months ago that bare metal using Rust was in a bad state. If I recall correctly the outputs were prohibitively large, among other issues.
Has that changed?