Despite my day job involving rust, I struggled pretty hard getting Rust working adequately for my little GPU project on both pi pico and an esp32s3. Both had debugg-ability issues, missing features that would have required advanced FFI integrations to be added, and things just wouldn't even work. I spent a week on it making no progress, and with only an hour an evening I had to do anything it was frustrating.
I then spent 2 days brushing up on C and got things up and running with ESP-IDF painlessly. I've been iterating really fast on C just fine, and the few times I wish I had Rust's features have been eclipsed by the advanced ESP-IDF api's I've needed to use that didn't have support in the Rust HALs.
My experience wasn’t stellar but it wasn’t like yours. There’s of course no comparison between the speed of getting up and running with the official sdk and toolchain, but it wasn’t so miserable.
I then spent 2 days brushing up on C and got things up and running with ESP-IDF painlessly. I've been iterating really fast on C just fine, and the few times I wish I had Rust's features have been eclipsed by the advanced ESP-IDF api's I've needed to use that didn't have support in the Rust HALs.