Flight Controller: Why Rust?

Picture your drone crashing mid-flight from a memory bug. Rust prevents that. For an embedded system such as a flight controller, choosing a language that balances safety, performance, and maintainability is key. With years of Rust under my belt, it’s now my go-to for systems programming.

Rust does have an infamous learning curve, largely due to its borrow checker, which enforces strict ownership and lifetime rules. However, once that mental model clicks, the code becomes remarkably straightforward to reason about and maintain.

The Rust tooling ecosystem is another major advantage. Getting a program running is usually as simple as cargo run, and sharing code is equally effortless—if someone has written a good state estimation crate, adding it to my project is just a matter of cargo add cool-estimation-lib.

Perhaps most importantly for a drone project, Rust provides strong memory safety guarantees. Unlike with C or C++, you won’t get a segmentation fault mid-flight—exactly the kind of reliability you want in an airborne system. Best of all, Rust delivers this safety without sacrificing performance, which is crucial in computationally intensive or real-time applications like flight control.