D at 8-bit platform - some experiences

[Iain Buclaw]

Nice write up!

On Thursday, 6 July 2023 at 17:18:26 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> Just thought to share my experiences, in case someone is 
> interested in D on 8-bit. Note that I've been using LDC all 
> along. I'm pretty sure GDC can also be used for AVR, but I 
> don't know how the experience would compare. For LDC, I think 
> the experience is better than expected considering it's an 
> environment D isn't designed for. Solving a few worst codegen 
> bugs might make it about as good there as on any bare-metal 
> platform. As always though, LDC is a volunteer project so I'm 
> not saying that anyone should tackle them.

There's a gdc-9.x compiler configured to generate assembly for 
avr-elf on my self-hosted compiler-explorer site. so did a 
v.quick translation of llvmir into gcc built-ins for sake of 
comparison.

https://explore.dgnu.org/z/MnT35x

There's going to have been quite a few changes compared to 
gdc-13.1 - I hope for the better, but I have some intuition that 
tells me we're more at the mercy of the front-end implementation 
doing silly lowerings now compared to 2.076.x.