Dlang on $4 microcontroller board from Raspberry Pi RP2040

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On Tuesday, 1 March 2022 at 07:24:07 UTC, forkit wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 March 2022 at 05:07:09 UTC, Igor Myronov wrote:
>> I'm wondering if a such nice programming language should be 
>> possible to use on small MCU's like RP2040,PIC32 and so on.
>> Thanks.
>
> Arhggg...32bit controllers! In 2022!
>
> There goes any hope of ridding D of its 32bit baggage.

32 bit has smaller codegen, is less complex in PCB design, HW 
interfaces and driver development, more energy efficient, 
physically smaller, runs cooler, generally runs faster and is a 
cheaper component.

It does depend on the project but in the last decade where I work 
we have had only 1 project using a 64-bit micro. The rest have 
been 32 bit and two or three 8-bit devices. We have a 8-bit 
project running atm, which has been really fun to work on!


We surveyed D and had to turn it down unfortunately because it 
wasn't suitable for micro development at the time. We may 
revisit, but currently C++17 & C++20 dominate with support on 
some projects from micropython, CPython and Go. We also surveyed 
Rust and found the cognitive load for old embedded devs led to 
more bugs, sure we had fewer memory issues but the memory safety 
of Rust leaks into the code like Perl noise. Our devs didn't like 
that because the code was too hard to grok and reason about on 
the page. I am sure they would have gotten used to it but it 
wasn't worth the investment when we have Go and C++20.