simmons

This is great! I think it could have uses far beyond the Raspberry Pi. As someone who's worked in the consumer electronics industry for years, I think we desperately need to rethink our approach to Linux-based electronics with respect to both the userland and the primary application. A legacy-free framework written in a safe language could go a long way to improving our currently lousy reputation with respect to security and reliability. (Yes, fresh code will have fresh bugs even in a safe language -- but it's a start!) I'm also keeping my eyes open for similar ideas using Rust.

elcritch
Exactly, the security in legacy systems is non-existent. I've been pretty pleased moving systems to the nerves-project [1] (which like GoKrazy has an A/B root file-system) to replace deprecated and ancient firmware systems. One of those setups required a Windows XP machine to flash the particular MCU that's obsolete now, a huge pain. It was almost impossible to update / patch.

Nerves is based on a Buildroot core but most of the system is built with Elixir and BEAM/OTP. It's fantastic having a high level language built for robustness and reasonable security. Still, I have dreams of porting BEAM to Redox OS one day [2] and replacing the C userland-bits with Rust-bits. Especially if you could represent the micro-kernel services as actors. That would be amazing!

1: https://nerves-project.org/ 2: https://github.com/redox-os/redox