D for embedded system

[Freddie Chopin]

On Tuesday, 8 January 2013 at 15:45:18 UTC, Matthew Caron wrote:
> On 01/08/2013 09:22 AM, Freddie Chopin wrote:> Hi!
> >
> > Any progress on making D an usable alternative for C/C++ for
> ARM
> > MCUs?
>
> I had a cross compiler working based on an older version of 
> this:
>
> http://gdcproject.org/wiki/Cross%20Compiler/crosstool-NG
>
> Bear in mind that my embedded system is an ARM CPU with at 
> least 16MB of RAM, so it runs Linux and is basically just a 
> small footprint Linux distro. If you mean "bare metal", I 
> haven't done that.

Yes, we're talking about real bare-metal here (; I think D with 
it's safety fits really nicely in the embedded niche... I think 
that if D could be used on a system with 128kB of flash and 8kB 
of RAM that would be great. If it would require the chip to have 
more RAM it wouldn't be so great, but a 16kB or 32kB is still 
quite OK... This would probably require D's lib (phobos) to NOT 
depend on garbage collector (or maybe use it only in some 
high-level stuff that would be to big for such embedded system 
anyway).

> > Anyway - do you think that D's threads could actually replace
> a
> > RTOS on an embedded system? This would be quite interesting
> too (;
>
> An RTOS does a lot more than manage threads. ;-)

Well, RTOSes ("schedulers") like FreeRTOS don't do that much - 
you have threads, mutexes/semaphores, message queue and software 
timers - all of them but the last one is covered by D APIs, but 
now I thought that D probably just uses some OS services for that 
(like POSIX pthread.h), wrapping it up a little...

Anyway - I think these functions of D would nicely replace simple 
RTOSes that have a scheduler and nothing more...

4\/3!!