Rust bare metal on ARM microcontroller
In this technical retrospective (2015), @AndrewDucker 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 80 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 20 comments
We've been actively working on stabilizing #![no_std], as well as making cross-compilation easier. In the future, ideally, you'll just need
``` $ cargo build --target thumbv7em-none-eabi
``` instead of
``` $ rustc -C opt-level=2 -Z no-landing-pads --target thumbv7em-none-eabi -g --emit obj -L libcore-thumbv7m -o runtime.o runtime.rs
``` or other shenanigans. You can run that Cargo command right now, but you still need to do a little bit of work first.
Rust does look promising for embedded applications. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use it to program Pebble applications. I managed to get a simple executable written in rust to write to the screen a few months ago, but haven't been able to get even slightly more complex things to work. Hopefully the hard work of rust devs will make this easier in the future.
Very nice. When this gets cleaned up, and Rust stabilizes a bit more, it should be promoted for the Arduino Due. The Due is a minimal ARM machine, a step up from the Atmel CPUs but well below the level required to run Linux.
Safety at the Rust level is very valuable in embedded work. Debugging small embedded machines is not fun.
This is going to be interesting. Rust on top of rumprun bare-metal unikernel https://twitter.com/gandro23/status/645734117699624960 ↗