picostd - motivation

[brodycj]

From my recent work experience at Amazon Robotics I discovered that while the standard C++ classes for features such as creating threads & managing mutex locking would be useful at multiple levels such as standard POSIX Linux/Unix code, embedded Linux & safety-certified embedded microcontroller OS, these standard C++ classes may not always be suitable for all of these levels.

Embedded microcontroller kernels sometimes decide to define their own APIs for the kind of code that normally works behind a standard POSIX C API.

Also, quite frankly some of the standard C++ classes, including the STL, and other projects such as Boost are designed to work really nicely with normal POSIX desktops, laptops, and servers, but not so well designed for low-power, embedded CPUs & OS libraries.

Rust has a really nice solution of providing a no_std option that can be used to build applications & many libraries without the bulk of its standard library ... with an option whether or not to support heap-based functionality with a custom allocator.

Given this experience, I am now very interested in working on a solution that can provide some of the most important functionality working as consistently & uniformly as possible across the workstation, server, and various embedded embedded levels, and other levels such as WASM in the browser & on the server. I just discovered something very interesting-looking: https://blog.nginx.org/blog/server-side-webassembly-nginx-unit

... and this: https://unit.nginx.org/ ... open-source: https://github.com/nginx/unit

Another pattern that may be helpful: https://www.sqlite.org/vfs.html - provides a nice, flexible, pluggable OS API with a clean-looking API. I am thinking this kind of flexible & pluggable architecture could be beneficial for Rust as well.

I would like to start by focusing on providing this kind of functionality for C++ & Rust, may consider higher-level languages such as Python, Java, etc. in the future. I have already registered multiple picostd domains, @picostd on X (Twitter) & GitHub org, will add Rust crate placeholder next ✅.