Rewriting firware tools in rust, lowering the barrier with web tools

"If you cannot use a CLI, you probably have no business in doing firmware."

This used to be true. Firmware is a hard thing to get into. You need to get familiar with a lot of things before you can do something meaningful. At least part of this barrier is having to use a CLI.

Rust has many advantages. When people advocate for rust it's usually about it being memory safe, rust having a good tooling like package managers and linters/formatters, a strong compiler telling exactly what you messed up, ... This is all very true and also applies when making CLI tools that relate to firmware development, but this talk wants to highlight another advantage of rust.

Rust has a wasm target arch which makes it easy to support both a CLI as well as a web application in the same codebase. The advantage of a web application for beginners is substantial: no need to download and compile a tool, no need to copy a command of which you understand only half, just visit a website and be greeted with an intuitive UI.

The goal of this talk is to showcase how making a webui alongside a CLI is possible and give some examples.

Some examples
https://rflasher.9elements.com
https://rem100.9ements.com
https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/NORbert/pull/9 (PR for web tool)