Arduino and D

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2018-05-15 at 22:28 +0000, Filipe Laíns via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> 

> Actually, most arduinos use Atmel's chips so most of them are AVR.
> Apparently, there was some work done to port GDC to AVR [1]. I 
> don't really know the usability of this but I suspect it's not 
> much.

[1] Looks very old and unmaintained, i.e. 4 years since the last commit. Also
D (gdc) is now a part of the GCC suite, which may explain [1] being retred.
GCC has AVR backends, thus gdc has an AVR backend. Also it has an ARM backend.
Like ldc, gdc gets many backends (more or less) for free.

GCC is now at 8.0.0, but what version of D is it using in gdc?

Is a desire to see D used more in IoT projects a reason for more people to be
interested in gdc and help get it's version updated with each GCC release.
Alternatively does D in IoT mean "use ldc". Does the LLVM suite support AVR
and ARM backends as GCC does?

> If you want a board with similar size too small arduino like the 
> pro/pro mini that has an ARM chip, you should have a look at 
> Teensy[2]. Using D to program ARM chips shouldn't be that hard.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/D-Programming-microD/GDC/tree/microD-4.9
> [2] https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Someone sent me a couple of ESP8266 development boards and a ESP-WROOM-32
development board, the intention being to play with them as MicroPython
devices. I see from the device websites, they are intended for use as standard
Arduino (presumably C) devices or as Lua controlled devices. Perhaps they
should be D controlled devices as well. I guess though the problem is which
firmware to load to then use as a D controlled device, and which toolchain to
use with it: Arduino mode has a full IDE/ICE set up. Also does D have the
library to deal with controlling hardware. How easy is it to build D codes
with gdc or ldc without Phobos, and without DRuntime? 

Is D wthout Phobos useful for IoT or should one stick with C,Lua, and
MicroPython? Is IoT an opportunity for D or is it a false direction given D is
an x86/x86_64 oriented programming language?

-- 
Russel.
==========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk
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