Pasadena Nights: The Legend of Rust vs Zephyr

Linux is the dominant operating system in the Cloud and even at the Edge. However, if you need to deploy constrained devices to support embedded or IoT use cases, Linux will simply not fit — even in its embedded incarnations. On the other hand, modern 32-bit and 64-bit microcontrollers have become increasingly more powerful and complex to leverage. If you are a developer, what is the best way to take advantage of the hardware at your disposal? 

This presentation is a fight to the death between two leading contenders. In the red corner is Rust, the trendy language armed with thread safety and memory safety. Embedded support in Rust is maturing rapidly, and many projects have built upon it to support synchronous and asynchronous programming styles. Rust firmware typically runs without an operating system. In the blue corner is Zephyr, the traditional real-time operating system (RTOS) from the Linux Foundation. Zephyr comes to the fight as a mature contender with broad hardware support and an extensive feature set. Which approach is right for your project: bare metal or RTOS? The goal of this presentation is to give you the knowledge you need to make that decision.