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0 pointsseren9y ago0 comments

To answer your last question, Hard real time embedded systems are everywhere in Robotics, Aerospace, Telecommunications, Automotive, Medical devices..

The real time capabilities are not always done in pure SW, there are some FPGAs, but when you do rely on SW, you often can not afford to spend even a few milliseconds in GC. In some case, that would mean killing or maiming someone.

And you are often tied to the HW vendor toolchain for a specific DSP, MCU,.. that is only supporting C or C++. This is a domain that is moving very slowly, currently my most optimistic time table would be able to have vendor support for Rust toolchain in 10 or 15 years but I don't foresee any GC language coming to replace the critical part written today in C or C++.

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exDM699y ago

Even soft real time systems like games or real time networking solutions suffer from non-deterministic GC pauses. Audio processing is another example.

You can get by in a GC'd system if you're careful not to allocate while being in the "hot path", but it's much more difficult than manual memory management (you need to know the internals of the GC algorithm) and interference from other threads may spoil your hard work.

Minecraft is a prime example of annoying (Java) GC pauses causing annoying interruptions. Another one is Kerbal Space Program's choppy audio (from C#/Mono GC). Although these games made millions or billions of dollars regardless, so you might argue it's a non-issue.

> currently my most optimistic time table would be able to have vendor support for Rust toolchain in 10 or 15 years

Not sure how much you'd need changes for the Rust compiler to be able to use it on MCUs and DSPs, but LLVM is more and more common and it might be (almost) enough to have the LLVM backend ported to the target arch. LLVM is moving fast, so for some targets it might be viable much sooner than your estimate.

serenOP9y ago

It was not clear from my post, but what I would like to have is a RTOS with an implementation of the Rust std modules, to be able to develop an application on top of it. As far as I know, no one is working on that.

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