Building LDC runtime for a microcontroller

[Dylan Graham]

On Monday, 7 September 2020 at 19:12:59 UTC, aberba wrote:
> On Monday, 7 September 2020 at 16:18:00 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Monday, 7 September 2020 at 15:23:28 UTC, Severin Teona 
>> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Use betterC, which is much better suited for microcontrollers 
>> than the full D. The disadvantage is that many great features 
>> are disabled in betterC.
>>
>> [...]
>
> How about an alternative runtime + standard library for 
> embedded systems...with a least bare minimum. I've seen a 
> number of efforts to get D to run in those environments but 
> almost none of them is packaged for others to consume.

I use D in an automotive environment (it controls parts of the 
powertrain, so yeah there are cars running around on D) on 
various types of ARM Cortex M CPUs, I think this will be the best 
way to extend D to those platforms.

The existing runtime is PC-oriented. Embedded stuff doesn't need 
a GC or some of the more advanced features, but having things 
like classes, interfaces, dynamic arrays would make the 
development workload a lot easier.

A lot of embedded stuff is done with RTOSs now that provide 
memory management and threading support, so having a flexible 
lightweight runtime with a generic backend (mem allocation, 
threads) that I can hook to the RTOS' libraries would be great.