About a year ago, my friend Alex Castillo reached out asking for help with an embedded software project. His company, Neurosity, had just released a major new version of the software stack running on their flagship brain-imaging device and they were experiencing some pretty bad performance regressions. I’d never worked on complex embedded systems before but having spent a good chunk of my career rebuilding all sorts of software for performance/scale, I figured I’d give it a shot.
It turned out to be an incredibly fun learning experience where I got the chance take my first Rust system to production. In this article I’ll go over the challenges I faced along the way and the solutions I came up with, wrapping it up with thoughts on converting a codebase to Rust and some generic advice for complex embedded software stacks.