Tales from the Embedded Rust Frontier: Bootstrapping a brand new ecosystem
As of May 2025 there were only really two vibrant ecosystems for bare-metal Rust on Arm - large 64-bit application processors (like on a Raspberry Pi) and small 32-bit microcontrollers (like an STM32). But this left a large unexplored space in the middle - medium-size 32-bit Arm processors, as used in real-time systems and older Single Board Computers.
Thankfully this space is now beginning to be explored, and we're going to look at some of the foundational crates that are now in place to help the next round of embedded developers get up and running much more quickly.
This is a tale of exploration, with a peek into the archive to understand the history of Arm, a review of some key crates and how they are put together and tested, and a look ahead at what is yet to come.
