hotelcalifornia/rusty-pros

expose purduesigbots/pros API to rust

rusty-pros's Issues

Compiling and linking

presumably we can set the proper target architecture, but linking might not be so easy

Task & Memory stuff

I have concerns about memory management with the way tasks are created. More specifically with RAII. When objects go out of scope, their destructor is called, for cleaning up heap memory. However, when a task is killed, the only memory stuff done by the kernel, is the stack is manually freed by PROS's task management, so I have no clue how you could actually get the destructors called.

Obviously, if you religiously follow the idea of tasks never exiting and never kill your tasks, this isn't a problem. However, if your autonomous takes longer than it should, and autonomous ends before your autonomous function exists, those destructors can't be called.

Also, when you are testing your robot, and flipping the enabled/disabled and auton/driver switches, you are constantly killing and starting tasks.

Also, more questions in regards to memory exist, with in regards to making Rust use the Kernels heap and stack. The solution for the heap seems to be custom allocators: https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.12.0/book/custom-allocators.html

I really don't know enough about how PROS influences the use of the stack and how it places memory from specific tasks on their respective TCBs, so I'll try and read some source and get some insight.

More reading on RAII in rust: https://rustbyexample.com/scope/raii.html

Update API.h

The current API.h file is 8 months old. Potentially a step could be added to the build process that grabs the latest one from purduesigbots/pros

Figure out two-way interop

This should be doable, potentially with a small kernel modification that lets you register your own initialize, initializeIO, autonomous, and opControl functions. For more on this, see this documentation