I remember looking into Rust for a personal project, on embedded, in 2016. After poking through all of it I decided against doing that because it was clear I'd be spending a lot of time getting Rust working at all instead of doing anything for the project itself. So C it was.<p>The thing I have to say in the context of the article is this: There is no way to know whether a complete rewrite in C would have yielded similar results to Rust. The phrase "C prototype" made me squirm, even more so when reading that in the context of critical infrastructure. It is known by now (or should be) that such prototypes live on like zombies, so unless it is really some throwaway (from the point of architecture!), these things tend to live on for longer than most feel comfortable with. And, being so critical in function, maintainability is one of the primary concerns.<p>Yes, Rust will, eventually, at some point, maybe? the go-to language we use in the embedded field, but we are talking not just about a language replacement, we are talking ecosystem replacement. That is not going to happen overnight.<p>That said, as some mentioned Java, Perl, and such things: I revived a personal Perl 5 project not too long ago that was more than 20 years old by that point. Needed a small change because the latest installment of Perl 5 is a bit more restrictive with some borderline syntax things (good), but other than that it just worked. In the larger context of the project there is also some C code for binary file processing, also >20 years old. Needed a renaming of a POSIX function (arguments and functionality all the same, though), and then it worked, even compiled as native 64 bit code. Granted, there are not that many dependencies beside POSIX, and the code was even back then written to a level of quality that allowed it to run on all sorts of (POSIX) platforms already.<p>Which is why "C prototype" sounds to me like "we cobbled something together", and all sorts of bugs are no surprise then. You can cut only so many corners before it becomes an issue, especially in software that is used all the time and in a critical place of a system. This needs to be done right, else you will waste a lot of time (and money!) afterwards.