Parallax Propeller Microcontroller

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 10/17/2014 02:06 PM, tcak wrote:
> I made some research, though couldn't have found any article about it.
> Is there any work that has been/is being done for Parallax Propeller
> Microcontroller with D Language? Any library, linker etc.
>
> As far as I see on wikipedia
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller), there are ports to
> microcontroller's assembler for C, Java, Pascal, Fortran.
>
> Note: For those who don't have knowledge about it, this microcontroller
> is 32 bit, and has 8 cores on it.

I've worked with the Propeller before. Really cool little chip, but due 
to the extremely limited memory and unconventional architecture (in some 
ways), I can only imagine that using high-level languages (even C) would 
mean giving up a non-trivial amount of power (and I seem to recall 
hearing exactly that happening, too), and I'm not sure it'd be worth the 
bother. Personally, I think it'd be better to just stick with Asm. It's 
not a particularly complicated Asm like modern forms of x86.

But then again, my experience with Propeller was very early in the 
chip's lifetime (only Asm and SPIN existed for it), so for all I know 
maybe compiler backends have managed to get pretty good at Propeller?

That said, D on Propeller *would* at least be pretty cool. Certainly be 
better than SPIN anyway.