STsteveklabnik·Feb 26, 2021
> Could you please post an example of how it helps in embedded / no allocator code?
In today's Rust, data structures often need to be a fixed size, or dynamically allocate. This will let you write a data structure that has a variable size, but set at compile time. I knocked out a quick ringbuffer recently; I picked a size that seemed fine, but that size is fixed at the moment. If I had used const generics, it could have been more flexible here, I could have written it more easily for any size, where the size is written at compile time. This is not my work code, but back when I was working on a hobby x86 kernel, I did this for a VGA buffer: https://github.com/intermezzOS/kernel/blob/master/vga/src/li... it's generic over "something that can be converted to a slice," so that it uses a slice in production, but a Vec in tests. This also leads
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to runtime checks https://github.com/intermezzOS/kernel/blob/master/vga/src/li... to make sure that the slice is the right size. This would be much better written with const generics today. The slice trick is neat, but awkward. (This code is also awkward because it grew an internal "frame buffer," so it kinda has both going on. This example needs const generics less since VGA has one single size at compile time ever, but sometimes, you need something where this isn't the case, and this was the first example of code I personally wrote that springs to mind.)
> What's your take on the Rust HALs?
I haven't used them enough. We use the layer below them, for example, the stm32f4 crate rather than the stm32f4xx-hal crate. That doesn't mean they're bad, I just literally have not used them enough to form an opinion. The namesake of this space is diversity, and so different people make different tradeoffs; we don't really need what those crates are offering right now.