Let me begin by saying congratulations to the Rust team and supporting community. I've been following Rust when I realized it would make for a good language to try with robotic controls (due to all the safety stuff). Stupid question time: What does this release mean for the embedded / control systems community? Will you be recommending any specific boards / micros / libraries from now forward? If so, which?
The story for rust in embedded contexts is not quite finished. There are dozens of people writing kernels in rust, there's zinc for arm microcontrollers and I've seen projects for raspi and PSX, so stuff works. It's not great yet, though. Once the allocator api is added to the stdlib it'll be much easier to use the standard library in embedded contexts. There's probably other stuff I don't know about but I know for sure that this is a priority for the near future.
My current approach to the heap problem (I'm working on a toy Rust kernel) is to compile the allocator portions of the standard library (liballoc) with a configuration flag that makes them use a particular set of external functions as the low-level heap allocation machinery. Then, my kernel provides these functions, and all the nice stuff (Box, Vec, etc.) "just works".
