Startup files for STM32F4xx

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On 25/04/2015 5:07 p.m., Jens Bauer wrote:
> On Saturday, 25 April 2015 at 04:21:06 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> The STM peripheral library really sux, verbose boilerplate for the
>> simplest stuff and no type safety for the enums (find the difference
>> of GPIO_PIN4 and GPIO_PinSource4 via debugging).
>
> I couldn't agree more. I especially hate the fact that pointers have to
> be type-casted into uint32_t!
>
> I know, I know.. It's always 32-bit on the Cortex-M microcontrollers,
> but ... it would make it easier to make a sandbox application or some
> test-suite running on a computer, if not having to type-cast everything.
>
>> It's also really hard to setup all the startup files, linker scripts
>> and debugger configs.
>>
>> In constrast we could provide a really amazing D experience on those
>> platforms.
>
> D is really suitable for microcontrollers; especially because classes no
> longer cost a payload of memory. This will allow us to make neat
> User-Interface objects easily, where a minimal UI library would be 5K in
> C++. I also hope that associative arrays and strings will fit most
> microcontrollers. I know that there might be problems, when we have
> little RAM available. I do not know how little memory is realistic at
> the moment; here I'm especially thinking about fragmentation and the use
> of the 'new' keyword.
>
> I hope to find a good way to use import for microcontroller libraries,
> so it'll be easy for everyone. I'm thinking about something like ...
>
> import mcu.stm32f439.all

Ugh, package.d?

> ... and I'm hoping to have this in a shared location instead of
> including the library in every source file like it's usually done in C
> and C++ based projects. But I will wait and see what the more
> experienced D)everlopers recommend. ;)
>
> While I remember it ... I had to nullify a number of imports in stdint.
> They simply do not belong in there. :)
> Eg. I do not want FILE* if I aks for stdint. But FILE* is forced upon
> me, because wchar_t includes it. What does a wchar_t need a file-system
> for ?
> Things like these might need a slight cleanup at some point (because
> normally, you don't have a file system on a microcontroller; thus you
> will get errors, when trying to import a simple file like stdint).