This issue is on nightly Rust, not stable. A stable Rust compiler update should never break code.

See: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-07-nightly-rust.html

No, it's on stable rust, maybe you got confused by the bug report talking about the nixos-unstable channel, that has nothing to do with the rust nightly builds, it's the version of nixos that is currently under development.

You can reproduce this yourself with:

  git clone https://github.com/cortex/ripasso.git
  cd ripasso
  git checkout release-0.5.1
  cargo build --locked

On my arch system this fails to build with the same errors as the bug report i got, and my rustc version is:

  $ rustc --version --verbose
  rustc 1.57.0 (f1edd0429 2021-11-29)
  binary: rustc
  commit-hash: f1edd0429582dd29cccacaf50fd134b05593bd9c
  commit-date: 2021-11-29
  host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
  release: 1.57.0
  LLVM version: 13.0.0

A lot of embedded stuff needs nightly. Or at least, it was like this a year or two ago.

A related issue is that for many companies "stable" means the version shipped with Ubuntu LTS.

Depends on the architecture: ARM for instance is a tier 1 target and you can use stable.

This is true for aarch64, but if you're not doing an embedded-linux style project, it's very likely you'll need nightly for inline assembly, though a significant chunk of that is being stabilized as we speak (though sadly not yet enough for my work...)

Good point. Though you can always link to .S for that last bit, right? I don't mean to tell you your business, I know you folks are doing much more intense stuff than I am. It doesn't surprise me that you'd know exactly what's keeping you from using stable.

It's all good, you're not wrong! It would just add a lot of complexity to the build for not a ton of gain...

It depends on your target architecture. For example, embedded development on ARM with stable Rust has been possible since 2018 (Rust 1.31)

Espressif (the makers of the hugely popular ESP32/ESP8266/... microcontrollers) hired an embedded Rust community member to work full time on Rust support for their chips: https://mabez.dev/blog/posts/esp-rust-espressif/

Does Espressif have large marketshare outside of hobbyists?

The ESP chips are in pretty much all cheap Chinese-made IoT and Smart Home devices.

My platform-agnostic CCS811 air quality sensor is now complete.

Mine is: https://blog.eldruin.com I write mostly about device drivers I write in Rust for use in embedded.