ARM Cortex-M Microcontroller startup files

[Jens Bauer via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 2 May 2015 at 21:53:42 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On Saturday, 2 May 2015 at 15:15:50 UTC, Jens Bauer wrote:
>> Will it be possible to have associative arrays without garbage 
>> collection ?
>
> You can write an AA container. A RefCounted AA implementation 
> might allow unsafe escaping though.

I think RefCount would do nicely for my own use. (I'm very much 
used to RefCount from ObjC; never grew up to use the GC there).

>> What about dynamic strings and dynamic arrays, don't they need 
>> GC ?
>
> Same here array slices require a GC to be safe, but one could 
> implement them like std::vector.
>
> While built-in arrays and AAs are nice to have it's trivial to 
> replace them with other containers, no need for GC.

Sounds good. :)

> I never even needed dynamic memory allocation on a 
> microcontroller.

Me neither, but I don't know if that would change.
I'm especially thinking about making a small database on a 
Cortex-M, which would be connected via Ethernet. Thus it would be 
small, diskless, but respond quickly.
Since the STM32F429 Discovery board comes with an on-board 64Mbit 
SDRAM, it's very tempting to have optional support for large 
memory.

After trying AA on Javascript, I got quite interested in them 
(especially for database-use with Bloom filters).

AA would very likely allocate a lot of small blocks. I once wrote 
a very quick malloc, which had clusters of fixed size blocks for 
block sizes less than 32 bytes. It sped up our product so much 
that my boss (who worked on a different platform) came and asked 
how I did it. :)