GSOC - Holiday Edition

[Mike via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 11:38:17 UTC, Paulo  Pinto wrote:
>
> Personally I would chose Netduino and MicroEJ capable boards if 
> I ever do any electronics again as hobby.
>
> Given your experience wouldn't D be capable to target such 
> systems as well?
>

Yes, D is perfectly capable of targeting those boards using GDC 
and potentially even LDC, although LDC still has a few strange 
bugs [1].  In fact, with the right hackery, I assume D will 
generate far better code (smaller and faster) than the .Net Micro 
Framework or MicroEJ.

Another interesting offering is the Intel Edison/Galileo boards 
[2].  I'm under the impression that DMD would be able to generate 
code for those boards as well.  Although those boards are less 
like microcontrollers and more like micro PCs (e.g. Raspberry Pi, 
BeagleBone Black)

As a hobby, I highly recommend anyone interested getting 
themselves a board and trying it out.  The boards are 
surprisingly inexpensive.  With the right knowledge, it takes 
very little to get started, and can be quite rewarding to see the 
hardware "come alive" with your code.

1. Get yourself a GDC cross-compiler [3], and whatever tools are 
needed to interface a PC to your board (OpenOCD, or 
vendor-supplied tools).
2. Throw out Phobos and D Runtime, and create a small object.d 
with a few stubs as your runtime.
4. Write a simple program (e.g. blinky, semi-hosted "hello world" 
[4])
5. Create a linker script for your board.  This can be difficult 
the first time as you need an intimate understanding of your 
hardware and how the compiler generates code.
6. Use OpenOCD or your vendor's tools to upload the binary to 
your board, and bask in the satisfaction of bringing the board to 
life.

You won't be able to use classes, dynamic arrays, and a multitude 
of other language features unless you find a way to implement 
them in your runtime, but you will be able to write C-like code 
only with added bonuses like CTFE, templates, and mixins.

I'm sure those that actually take the plunge will find it to be a 
fun, educational, and rewarding exploration.

Mike

[1] - https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/781
[2] - 
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/maker.html
[3] - 
http://wiki.dlang.org/Bare_Metal_ARM_Cortex-M_GDC_Cross_Compiler
[4] - 
http://wiki.dlang.org/Minimal_semihosted_ARM_Cortex-M_%22Hello_World%22