Pith Number

pith:D7GOROYL

pith:2026:D7GOROYLU6LPSTVFS4T52RK6CO

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Embedded Rust or C Firmware? Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case with Ariel OS

Bipin Thapa, Daniele Alfonso, Emmanuel Baccelli, Kaspar Schleiser, Licio Mapelli, Lorenzo Bini, Romain Fouquet

Rust matches C in microcontroller firmware memory use and execution speed.

arxiv:2604.25679 v2 · 2026-04-28 · cs.OS

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\pithnumber{D7GOROYLU6LPSTVFS4T52RK6CO}

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2 Internet Archive

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4 Citations open

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✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

The analysis and measurements on hardware indicate no strong reason to prefer C over Rust for microcontroller firmware on the basis of memory footprint or execution speed. Furthermore, Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime in Rust whose footprint is smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bare-metal C stack traditionally used in this context. It is concluded that Rust is a sound choice today for firmware development in this domain.

C2weakest assumption

That the two teams produced functionally equivalent implementations and that the specific industrial IoT microcontroller use case is representative of broader firmware development scenarios.

C3one line summary

Rust firmware for industrial microcontrollers matches C in memory use and execution speed, with Ariel OS offering a smaller footprint than standard bare-metal C stacks.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T01:05:14.561100Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

1fcce8bb0ba796f94ea59727dd455e139bd2259514c104671e8a8aa436779fa4

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.25679 · arxiv_version: 2604.25679v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.25679 · pith_short_12: D7GOROYLU6LP · pith_short_16: D7GOROYLU6LPSTVF · pith_short_8: D7GOROYL

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/D7GOROYLU6LPSTVFS4T52RK6CO \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 1fcce8bb0ba796f94ea59727dd455e139bd2259514c104671e8a8aa436779fa4

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "e3342dd18bd847f0e8ea122650963d1acc7e2f819c12cc3fa6263117bde93c0b",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.OS",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-28T14:09:11Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "712bb5a6c2653b218752c2e57e3f41480ce7763a612a30de52769093c8ca65bc"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.25679",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}