Welcome

Dear Reader,

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Embedded Software with Rust.

To get the most from this book, you should already be comfortable with low-level systems programming. A background in C or C++ is ideal. You do not need to be a Rust expert, but some familiarity with the language will help. If you have written firmware before and understand what a linker script does, what a vector table is, and why memory layout matters, you are the reader this book was written for.

My interest in embedded Rust came from a practical frustration. C gives you full control of the hardware, but it also gives you full responsibility for every mistake. Memory-safety errors, invalid peripheral access, and silent aliasing between interrupt and foreground code are all things that show up late, often in the field, and often in ways that are hard to reproduce. Rust does not make embedded development easier in the early going. But it does move a significant class of defects from runtime to compile time, and once you have internalized that, the discipline it imposes starts to feel less like a constraint and more like a tool.