Orateur
Description
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) has served for more than three decades as a foundational framework for distributed control systems at accelerator facilities, synchrotron light sources, and large-scale scientific instruments. Its mature ecosystem and extensive set of support modules, developed through long-term community collaboration, have enabled reliable operation of complex experimental infrastructures worldwide.
This work presents epics-rs, an experimental implementation of core EPICS concepts written in the Rust programming language. The project investigates whether modern language features — including strong memory safety guarantees, expressive concurrency primitives, and an integrated package management system — can simplify the development and deployment of EPICS-based simulation environments while remaining interoperable with the existing ecosystem.
The current implementation provides Channel Access client and server functionality, an IOC runtime supporting a subset of commonly used record types, an asynchronous device interface inspired by the asyn framework, and components for motor control and detector-style data processing pipelines. The Channel Access protocol implementation is wire-compatible with standard EPICS tools and clients such as caget, camonitor, CSS, Phoebus, and PyDM, allowing epics-rs IOCs to integrate with existing control system environments without modification.
A primary motivation for this work is to support rapid prototyping and software-based simulation of complex device environments. Such simulations can be useful during early stages of system design, for development and testing of control logic, and for validating data processing pipelines before deployment in production systems based on the established C/C++ EPICS infrastructure.
The goal of epics-rs is not to replace existing EPICS implementations, but to explore alternative implementation approaches and provide an additional tool for experimentation and simulation workflows. We hope that the experience gained from this work may contribute to ongoing discussions within the EPICS community about future development directions.