Rust translation of Basilisk framework

[ephraim71]

Hi all!
Huge fans and users of Basilisk here. @schaubh

Me / @themouli / @madhav-madhusoodanan have been working on a rust translation of basilisk - this includes the core simulation base class, message passing, dynamics modules and FSW modules.

The main motivation behind this is that

1. Rust provides memory safety throughout the full simulation framework, both on the dynamics and on the fsw side. This eliminates a huge class of bugs.
2. Rust provides great package management and many modern programming features.
3. Many space companies are also increasingly moving towards Rust for onboard GNC, and this enables us to use these translated basilisk modules directly in these frameworks.
4. Insanely good error messages, instead of just "Segmentation faults".
5. Some other benefits we have noticed so far : faster run times, much smaller build size and build times.
6. In future releases, compile to web assembly easily, run directly in browsers, etc.

LLMs/agents are also increasingly part of everyone's workflows, and due to great compiler errors, rust is easily one of the best languages to iterate on. So this should also enable faster ideation of both dynamics and flight software concepts.

Some parts of the translation were done using LLMs, and we intend to review any automated translation fully by v1 release.

5 scenarios already work and about a dozen modules have been ported so far.
We will add PyO3 in a future release for python bindings. The goal is that existing Basilisk python scripts should just work out of the box.

One of the results from MTB Momentum Management example :

By v1 release, goal is that all module unit tests and example scenarios match within machine level precision.

Thanks to @ChristopherRabotin for the wonderful hifitime and anise libraries, which we used extensively.

This is currently hosted here, we would like to explore avenues where this can be maintained, perhaps under AVSLab Github org.

Feedback / issue reports / contributions most welcome!

[themouli]

We are aiming for the following by v1:

• All of the modules translated and validated to machine precision
• Python bindings to support the existing scripts
• Flexible logging/backend support (csv, databases, live streams, etc)
• Vizard support

[schaubh]

Interesting, thanks for sharing. This sounds like a pure RUST translation of BSK. I'm working currently on allowing Rust modules to run side by side with C, C++ and Python modules. Once we have a more mature branch going you are welcome to take a look. If we can keep some required commonalities in how a Rust BSK module is written, I think there is a good chance that you could take your Rust BSK modules from Rust-BSK and run them within our AVS lab BSK if needed.

[pathak-arya]

incredibly cool! hope to see this into mainline bsk soon!