Rust promises something that sounds almost too good to be true: the raw speed of C with memory safety baked in by the compiler. For robot firmware, that’s a big deal.
What is Rust?
Rust is a compiled, statically-typed programming language designed for systems programming, first released in 2015.
The headline feature is the ownership and borrowing system. Instead of a garbage collector slowing things down at runtime, Rust enforces strict rules at compile time about who owns a piece of memory and when it gets freed. Get it wrong and your code won’t compile — which is annoying at first, but means an entire class of bugs (null pointer dereferences, buffer overflows, use-after-free) simply can’t make it into your binary.
A few things worth knowing:
- Rust compiles to native machine code — no virtual machine, no interpreter.
- It targets
no_stdenvironments, meaning you can run it on bare-metal microcontrollers with no operating system. - The
cargobuild tool and package manager are excellent and come bundled with the language. - The ARM Cortex-M core inside the Raspberry Pi Pico is a supported target (
thumbv6m-none-eabi).
Why robot builders care
When your robot is reacting to sensor data in real time, predictable performance matters. Rust gives you deterministic execution — there’s no garbage collector pausing your control loop at an inconvenient moment.
More practically: if you’re writing firmware for a motor controller, a PID loop, or anything that handles interrupts close to the metal, Rust lets you write that code safely. You get the control of C without the hours of debugging mysterious memory corruption.
It also plays well with existing ecosystems. You can call C libraries from Rust (and vice versa), so you’re not starting from scratch if you need a vendor’s driver.
For larger projects running on Linux — a Raspberry Pi navigating a room, say — Rust’s async and concurrency support means you can spin up multiple tasks without worrying about data races. The compiler catches those too.
Get started
The best place to begin is the official toolchain installer at rustup.rs, which sets up cargo and rustc in one go.
Once you’re comfortable with the basics, try getting Rust running on a Raspberry Pi Pico. Kevin’s Introduction to Rust course walks you through the language fundamentals, ownership and borrowing, structs, error handling, and concurrency — and it ends with a dedicated lesson on targeting the Pico directly, including cross-compiling with cargo build --target thumbv6m-none-eabi and flashing the resulting binary via UF2.
If you’re coming from Python or MicroPython, the early lessons are designed with you in mind — the course explicitly maps Rust concepts onto things you already know from Python.
A good first mini-project: write a Rust blink program for the Pico. It covers toolchain setup, the build process, and gives you a working embedded Rust binary in under an hour.
Reacts well with
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