Cabanis-HI1200×1505 72 KB

David Cabanis

Embedded firmware has always demanded close control over hardware: memory-mapped registers, interrupts, linker scripts, startup code, timing, and strict resource limits. Traditionally, that has meant C or C++, along with all the familiar risks around pointer misuse, undefined behavior, data races, and fragile error handling.

Rust offers another path. It gives embedded developers low-level control while adding compile-time checks for memory safety, ownership, borrowing, and concurrency. For firmware running in consumer devices, industrial systems, vehicles, medical equipment, robotics, and edge platforms, those guarantees matter.

Embedded Software with Rust is a practical guide to building bare-metal firmware in Rust. It starts with the foundations and moves steadily toward working hardware-focused development, showing how Rust’s language features connect directly to embedded tasks.

Inside the book, you’ll learn how to:

• Set up an embedded Rust development environment

• Build and inspect firmware with Cargo, cargo-binutils, GNU tools, OpenOCD, probe-rs, and QEMU

• Configure no_std projects for bare-metal execution

• Understand the reset-to-main() path on Cortex-M systems

• Define memory layouts with linker scripts and memory.x

• Work with startup code, vector tables, exceptions, and interrupts

• Share data safely between main code and interrupt handlers

• Use PACs, HALs, BSPs, and embedded-hal traits

• Manage memory in constrained systems

• Interoperate with C as part of a migration path

The book is hands-on throughout. Early chapters walk through toolchain setup, project structure, no_std configuration, linker scripts, and minimal startup. Later chapters expand into memory-mapped I/O, debugging, profiling, stack and heap management, async and RTOS compatibility, performance tuning, and Rust-C integration.

A big strength of the book is that it explains what is happening underneath the abstractions. You won’t only use cortex-m-rt, embedded-hal, or a board support crate; you’ll also see how the reset handler, vector table, .data copying, .bss zeroing, panic behavior, and interrupt dispatch actually fit together.

The book is written for software engineers with basic Rust knowledge. Prior embedded experience helps, but the text introduces the needed background step by step. Experienced firmware engineers coming from C or C++ will also find plenty of familiar ground, especially around build/debug workflows, hardware registers, linker configuration, and interrupt-driven design.

About the author: Dr David Cabanis is Principal Engineer at Doulos, specializing in Arm embedded software, FPGA and SoC design, and system-level modeling. He is an ARM Accredited Engineer, MCU Engineer, and former ARM Certified Trainer, with deep practical experience in embedded Rust.

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