Hacker News Reader

Even if you didn't have Output Pin, couldn't you just declare a sum type?

enum MyPin { P0, P1 }

Edit: feel free to ignore, read your answer somewhere else about this

You would then have to pattern match when you read the value but I don't see a reason to reach for macros or anything more complicated.

That said, really enjoyed the read (and I'll definitely try zig at some point, if only for the speed / compile experience), even if my experience with Rust didn't match yours; my background is a bit different though, I worked with C++ and Haskell in the past, which definitely made rust feel almost natural. Overall I'd say that the compiler helps me not to keep a lot of rust syntax in my mind and just try things until it works

As someone who has gone from python -> c++ -> rust I'll agree with you here. Rust feels a lot more natural than c++ to get your ideas into code.

>An aside about "type state programming": Microcontrollers have a lot of functionality packed into the pins (see the STM32 "Alternate Function" datasheet tables). Trying to model all of that using ownership of zero-sized generic types would strike me as a "when all you have is a hammer"-type situation.

I second this. The idea of checking that a pin is "only used in one place" doesn't really jive with how I think about microcontroller programming. It's very common for one pin to be used for multiple distinct purposes at different times.

There's also a lot of different ways of conceptually slicing pin states. For example, if you are charlieplexing LEDs than you'll switch pins between 'input' (high impedance) and 'output' modes, but at a higher level the pin is serving a single function.

> The idea of checking that a pin is "only used in one place" doesn't really jive with how I think about microcontroller programming.

The borrow checker is not checking that the pin is used in "only one place", it is checking that you don't use the same pin for two different purposes at the same time.

It make sure that you configure your pin as output pin before using it as an output pin, and that you reconfigure it to input pin when using it as such.

(And there are some escape hatch to use when the type system is not sufficient to express that different code paths are disjoint, like RefCell, with runtime check, or unsafe)

My rough understanding.

Borrow checker tracks who is using what over time. The can prevent concurrency and uncoordinated mutation, use after free type problems.

Type system checks how it is being used.

Both are tools and can used to help ensure a correct program. It really comes down to how these _tools_ are used to help the programmer and the team deconstruct and manage a system to solve a problem.

I think petgraph [1] is an excellent example of relaxing some of the constraints imposed by the tools (borrow checker, type system) to make a system that was easier to use and extend. These things are much more continuous than we realize, it isn't all or nothing.

In a lot of ways, I wish Rust's complexity was a little more gradual, or that we knew how to use it in a gradual way. Use of Rust features encourages C++ levels of complexity. Use of Zig features encourages C-ish levels of complexity.

Zig is to C

as

Rust is to C++

I also think the author had a much better model of the system and the hardware and what they wanted to accomplish during the rewrite and could better project the problem domain and the language together.

Learning Rust and the problem domain at the same time is extremely difficult and in a way leads to a perversion of both.

What do you think about modeling the hardware as a "Resource" register, port, memory, etc. Then modeling a type over a collection of resources.

The question that I would ask myself when trying to use Rust and the features it has out of the box is, "How much fine grain rigor do I want Rust to model for me?" For the keyboard scanning code, in asm or C, one might just have a function `get_keyboard_state(*keyboard_buffer)` but this exposes a sampling problem and would require the programmer to determine state transitions. So maybe a channel or an iterator would be better. Then we might nee to run it in an ISR, the hardware it uses might be multiplexed with other parts of the system, etc.

Every Rust feature needs to be weighed, or rather, given a complexity budget, every Rust feature needs to be purchased.

Zig is awesome BTW, but it doesn't make the same correctness guarantees that Rust can.

[1] petgraph, https://docs.rs/crate/petgraph/0.5.1

> Borrow checker tracks who is using what over time.

This is a very imprecise statement. Do you mean tracks at "compile time" or at "run time"?

A more accurate statement would be -- the borrow checker enforces a specific set of rules and constraints at _compile time_ only. But this set of constraints guarantees memory safety at run time (with the exception of unsafe code). In fact, Rust's runtime is minimal -- it handles panics but has no GC or other bells and whistles. The fancy things are in libraries.

Ah, I was going on what the OP said ("ensuring that a given pin cannot be used in multiple places").

That seems sensible, but also not particularly valuable. A lot of the time it makes sense both to 'read' and 'write' from a pin (e.g. if it's open-drain with a pullup).

This was an inaccuracy on my part, sorry for that. It should probably have been "... used in multiple places _at the same time_".

> It's very common for one pin to be used for multiple distinct purposes at different times.

Anecdotal, but as someone who works in this space I haven't found this to be the case. In my experience, any particular pin is wired up for a specific purpose, and so the firmware usually just sets it to that mode as appropriate. Generally if it's found that the needed peripherals couldn't be multiplexed to pins without conflicts, it's time to move up to a package with more pins brought out.

I'm currently working on a relatively involved firmware for ATSAMD21 in Rust, and have mostly enjoyed the experience. While some of the language concepts have taken me a while to get comfortable with, and we're still figuring out parts of the ecosystem, it's quite usable and the tooling is a huge improvement over anything else I've seen.

> The idea of checking that a pin is "only used in one place" doesn't really jive with how I think about microcontroller programming.

I'm with you, but ...

I find that most SDKs invariably grow a C macro system for "Configure this pin/register/whatever and yell if somebody tries to reconfigure it".

The fact that Rust is baking this in up front is not unwarranted.

I think you can do something like this with your Rust code using macros.

  struct P0{}
  
  impl P0{
    fn write(self:&Self,pin:usize){
        std::println!("Writing port P0 on pin {}",pin);
    }
  }

  struct P1{}

  impl P1{
    fn write(self:&Self,pin:usize){
        std::println!("Writing port P1 on pin {}",pin);
    }
  }

  macro_rules! for_each_port_pin{
    ($port:ident,$pin:ident,$b:block, 
  $(($e1:expr,$e2:expr)),*) =>{
        $(
        let $port = $e1;
        let $pin = $e2;
        $b
        );*
    }
  }

  fn main(){
    let p0 = P0{};
    let p1 = P1{};
    
    for_each_port_pin!(port,pin,
    {port.write(pin);},
    (&p0,10usize),(&p1,7usize)
    );
  }

Rust playground link: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Or a trait...

Yeah, I was thinking trait while reading that bit... maybe I missed something?

I agree that iterating over types of a tuple is indeed not easy, but in that case, it should be trivial to iterate over an array of `&dyn OutputPin`. Why is that not working in this case?

I really like your Atreus. Are my eyes correct that it's using choc switches? Can you share where you got that one?

Interesting write-up! I've barely used Rust but had/have a similar feeling. It's really more akin to C++ and really powerful but also pretty complex. For smaller MCU projects it just feels like overkill.

> Microcontrollers have a lot of functionality packed into the pins (see the STM32 "Alternate Function" datasheet tables). Trying to model all of that using ownership of zero-sized generic types would strike me as a "when all you have is a hammer"-type situation.

The whole idea of utilizing TLA+ for a system level check really does seem like something that would be awesome, even if it's unclear how much effort it'd require to instrument an entire project with TLA+.

> the problem is simply that Rust makes it difficult to conceptually iterate over distinct types (regardless if such iteration occurs at runtime via a loop or at compile-time via an unrolled loop, as per Zig's `inline for`).

Rust just brings a lot of incidental complexity along and still makes some things really difficult. Perhaps it's better in the long run but it's just harder to work with.

Similarly, I wanted a simpler language than Rust and started using Nim last summer for embedded projects. Primarily since it compiles to C which let's me target ESP32's and existing RTOS'es without rewriting everything or trying to get LLVM based tools to work with GCC ones. However, it also embraces `lazy` compilation approach to code and it's standard library.

I wanted to try your example in Nim. Here's roughly how your example would look in Nim (it appears to duck type fine as well):

    var
      # normally just import these from the C headers as-is
      # but this lets us run it
      p0* : RefPort0 = addr port0
      p1* : RefPort1 = addr port1

    var rows = (
         ( port: p1, pin: 0 ),
         ( port: p1, pin: 1 ),
         ( port: p1, pin: 2 ),
         ( port: p1, pin: 4 ),
      )

    var cols = (
        (port: p0, pin: 13 ),
        (port: p1, pin: 15 ),
        ...
        (port: p0, pin: 2 )
      )

    proc initKeyboardGPIO() =
      rows[0].port.pin[rows[0].pin].dir = output

      for item in rows.fields: 
        item.port.pin[item.pin].dir = output

Full example: https://gist.github.com/elcritch/1c8279418fc62f5e941b41a5df4...

I've toyed with the thought of adding TLA+ hooks into Nim similar to Dr Nim (https://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/drnim.html) using the effect system. Not sure if Zig has an effect system for a similar setup.