Embedded Rust in 2019

It's been a busy year for many of the members of the Embedded-WG this year, and we had a chance to catch up at OxidizeConf a few weeks ago. We discussed two main things, Moving off of Mozilla IRC, and our goals for (part of) 2019.

Goals for 2019

In 2018, the Embedded WG pushed hard to get the Cortex-M targets supported as stable targets in the upstream Rust project. Since then, due to work and life responsibilities, a number of us have been particularly busy in 2019.

At Oxidize, we discussed what our 2019 goals should be. There were suggestions to get some the foundational level crates like cortex-m , cortex-m-rt , and tools like svd2rust to a "1.0 state". However, while there were a number of improvements we could think of, we couldn't draw any clear lines of what it would take for us to be comfortable cutting a 1.0 release of these projects.

Based on the two points above, we discussed a slightly different plan: Focusing on building out the ecosystem in 2019, by building more "fun" stuff, like example projects, cool applications, and extracting and publishing reusable components from these projects to fill in the embedded Rust ecosystem.

By focusing on building out, instead of trying to perfect what we already have, we hope to find out the things we don't know we are missing, and inspire other members of the community to begin working and building with Embedded Rust. We'll keep this as a focus through the summer (until September or October 2019). This can be thought of as a parallel to the upstream "Libs Blitz" that the Rust project successfully completed in 2017.

Our weekly meetings will likely relax a bit, and will generally change focus to quickly discuss any high priority issues, then open up to a more informal "show and tell", where people can discuss the things they have been building and would like to share. We hope you'll all join us to share the wonderful things you build this summer in embedded Rust!

Moving off Mozilla IRC

At the end of April, Mozilla announced that they would be shutting down irc.mozilla.org . The Rust project as a whole will generally be moving on to other platforms such as Discord and Zulip.

The Embedded Working Group is actually one of the few (if not only) working groups that still primarily rely on IRC. We have a few hundred people who idle in the room, and tend to have fairly active discussions there, including our weekly status meetings. We have discussed moving to other platforms previously, but have been unable to get any sort of consensus on what to move to instead. Those discussions lead to a fruitful evaluation of alternatives and led to a pre-selection of suitable services.

To move things forward RFC 0351 Chat Vote has been proposed and accepted by the WG which was subsequently implemented by opening voting issue to poll the public opinion on this matter. Anyone with a GitHub account is invited to cast vote(s) until 23:59 CEST on Sunday, 2019-06-23, the detailed rules are explained in the issue and fair discussion is very welcome.