Rustifying Embedded Software Development: A Model-Based Code Generation Approach for Auto-Generation of C and RUST

Abstract:
Rust has gained traction as a viable alternative to C within embedded software development, largely due to its focus on memory safety and advanced language abstraction. Building on these principles, we have extended an existing modelbased code generator, which is rooted in Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) concepts, to leverage the advantages of Rust. This method allows for generating C and Rust code from a single, platform-independent model, enhancing adaptability to changing requirements. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evidenced by the successful generation of a dotproduct function compared to an equivalent implementation from the CMSIS-DSP kernel library in both C and Rust. In particular, this paper’s comparisons show a decrease in manual effort by 23-fold, improving the performance of previous approaches to streamline embedded software development.