I'd be interested in seeing the challenges and outcomes of assumptions made porting between 64-bit von neumann and 8-bit harvard architecture systems.
Most of the AVR community tends to code in a mix of C and assembly, I think Rust is possibly not the best language to port, and type safety is not really an issue that's going to sell it.
To put it into perspective, Rust on a more powerful IC like an ESP32 or STMF32 makes sense to me, as you have a lot more to play with, but I've spent the best part of a year and a half working on a design constrained within 512 bytes of dynamic RAM, 512 bytes of SRAM and 512 bytes of EEPROM. I'm not sure what type safety buys me when I'm already trying to squeeze out every last bit.
All of this is not to suggest we shouldn't try new things, of course we should. Hacking things previously thought impossible is a longstanding and welcome tradition. However, I'm struggling to see how this would increase adoption of Rust, or make things significantly easier for AVR users vs say Arduino scratch.
Most of the AVR community tends to code in a mix of C and assembly, I think Rust is possibly not the best language to port, and type safety is not really an issue that's going to sell it.
To put it into perspective, Rust on a more powerful IC like an ESP32 or STMF32 makes sense to me, as you have a lot more to play with, but I've spent the best part of a year and a half working on a design constrained within 512 bytes of dynamic RAM, 512 bytes of SRAM and 512 bytes of EEPROM. I'm not sure what type safety buys me when I'm already trying to squeeze out every last bit.
All of this is not to suggest we shouldn't try new things, of course we should. Hacking things previously thought impossible is a longstanding and welcome tradition. However, I'm struggling to see how this would increase adoption of Rust, or make things significantly easier for AVR users vs say Arduino scratch.