Episode 878 transcript

FLOSS-878 Jonathan Bennett: This week I'm talking with Jonathan Pallant about Rust and primarily in the embedded world, the Raspberry Pi Pico, the Nordic, Espressif, all of your favorite little MCUs. You can run Rust there and partially due to efforts by people like Jonathan. This is Floss Weekly, episode 878, recorded Tuesday, August the 4th.

A tool with opinions Hey, folks. It's time for FOSS Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I am your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today, once again, we're gonna get rusty. Whereas last time though, when we talked to someone with Ferrous Systems, we were talking about Rust on the Linux desktop, in user space, Rust on general purpose computers, and today we're talking about Rust somewhere a little different.

I've got Jonathan Palant with us today. He is also from Ferrous Systems. In fact, I think his day job is teaching Rust there, and I think also doing some programming work. But let's get him on and ask about all of the places where Rust runs that you may not have thought about. Hey, Jonathan.

Welcome to the show.

Jonathan Pallant: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah, it's good to have you back. Or no, you for the first time. Good to have Ferrous Systems back. The second interview with one of you guys in a couple of months now. All right, so this, this magical thing called Rust it runs on the desktop, it runs on the server, it also runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico?

Jonathan Pallant: Yeah. It- So joys of having a systems programming language, right? You get a compiler, source code goes in, machine code comes out, right? So anything that runs the machine code should be able to run it. So yeah, Rust is really interesting in being able to scale from the very, very large. It is the language that powers Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare, and Google, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

But it scales down to, as you talked last time, desktop applications- ... things like Sudo written in Rust. But also scales down to the small, very small. How small is always an interesting question, but-

Jonathan Bennett: Yes, it is.

Jonathan Pallant: I have run Rust on ST Micro, Microcontroller, Arm Cortex-M4 32K flash, 4K RAM.

As modern things go, that's pretty small.

I'm not sure I'd be happy squeezing Rust-generated code onto like a Z80 or a 6502. That may be a bit too small, but certainly tens of K of flash, a few K of RAM, I think- ... is quite workable.