Introduction

The goal of this book is to provide a getting-started guide on using the Rust programming language with Espressif SoCs and modules using esp-hal.

The Two Approaches

First thing to decide when approaching Rust on Espressif SoCs is which approach you are going to use. We provide two very different ways to run your Rust code. (Actually there are three ways)

• Running in a hosted environment: use Rust including libstd on top of ESP-IDF - this matches the approach outlined here
• Running in a bare metal environment: use Rust without libstd and memory allocations are optionally supported - this matches the approach outlined here

This book will only cover the second approach. To learn more about the first approach please follow the instructions found in The Rust on ESP book

What is not covered?

In this book we will cover the basics using the most standard tools.

For many things there are alternative ways and tools but especially in the beginning that might be confusing.

Examples shown here usually apply to ESP32-C3 using the ESP32-C3-DevKit-RUST-1 board.

You can use any other ESP32, ESP32-C3, ESP32-S2 or ESP32-S3 development board but smaller code changes and configuration changes might be needed.

Also this book will only cover working locally. But there is support to use dev-containers and even developing in a hosted cloud environment like GitHub Codespaces and GitPod.

Additionally you can even try running code in a web browser without any actualy hardware using Wokwi

Important Terminology

This book assumes you are familiar with some special terms. If you don't already know what a PAC or HAL is there is a good introduction in the Discovery Book