Embedded Rust or C Firmware? Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case
As Rust gains traction for developing safer systems software, a reality check for the microcontroller hardware segment becomes necessary. How ready is the Rust ecosystem for this segment? Can Rust compete with C in practice? This paper reports on an IoT industrial case study that contributes to answering these questions. Two teams concurrently developing the same functionality (one in C, one in Rust) are analyzed over a period of several months. A comparative analysis of their approaches, results, and iterative efforts is provided. The analysis and measurements on hardware indicate no strong reason to prefer C over Rust for microcontroller firmware on the basis of memory footprint or execution speed. Furthermore, Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime in Rust whose footprint is smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bare-metal C stack traditionally used in this context. It is concluded that Rust is a sound choice today for firmware development in this domain.
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Computer Science > Operating Systems arXiv:2604.25679 (cs) [Submitted on 28 Apr 2026] Title:Embedded Rust or C Firmware? Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case with Ariel OS Authors:Bipin Thapa, Daniele Alfonso, Lorenzo Bini, Licio Mapelli, Kaspar Schleiser, Romain Fouquet, Emmanuel Baccelli View a PDF of the paper titled Embedded Rust or C Firmware? Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case with Ariel OS, by Bipin Thapa and 6 other authors View PDF Abstract:As Rust gains traction for developing safer systems software, a reality check for the microcontroller hardware segment becomes necessary.
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