Mutable Global State

Unfortunately, hardware is basically nothing but mutable global state, which can feel very frightening for a Rust developer. Hardware exists independently from the structures of the code we write, and can be modified at any time by the real world.

What should our rules be?

How can we reliably interact with these peripherals?

1. Always use volatile methods to read or write to peripheral memory, as it can change at any time
2. In software, we should be able to share any number of read-only accesses to these peripherals
3. If some software should have read-write access to a peripheral, it should hold the only reference to that peripheral

The Borrow Checker

The last two of these rules sound suspiciously similar to what the Borrow Checker does already!

Imagine if we could pass around ownership of these peripherals, or offer immutable or mutable references to them?

Well, we can, but for the Borrow Checker, we need to have exactly one instance of each peripheral, so Rust can handle this correctly. Well, luckily in the hardware, there is only one instance of any given peripheral, but how can we expose that in the structure of our code?