Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 06:35:49 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew 
Cattermole wrote:
>
> On 03/04/2024 10:28 PM, rkompass wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 2 April 2024 at 14:50:19 UTC, Richard (Rikki) 
>> Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>>> On 03/04/2024 2:23 AM, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
>>>> If you want to use GC and be portable, then (currently in D 
>>>> today) you have to write your own D runtime. Of which there 
>>>> is 3 or 4 custom ones!
>>>
>>> And worse still they each have to implement the compiler 
>>> hooks, when all they really need to implement is stuff like 
>>> allocation of memory!
>>>
>> 
>> Is this the reason why there is no D for Arduino?
>> 
>> (Which would be a big + in terms of popularity).
>
> No. Although it hasn't helped.
>
> Micro's tend to be on the small size, all the extra metadata 
> you need for D code like ModuleInfo and TypeInfo could easily 
> exceed that budget or bump you up into one of the more 
> expensive micros killing D off as a possible language.
>
> About the max you'd want here is -betterC which already works.

Yet many stuff is still possible without taking the GC out of the 
picture.

https://blog.arduino.cc/2019/08/23/tinygo-on-arduino/

https://www.hackster.io/alankrantas/tinygo-on-arduino-uno-an-introduction-6130f6

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/microcontrollers/

https://www.electromaker.io/blog/article/tinygo-brings-golang-to-microcontrollers

Now imagine if all those Maker magazines and events would be 
adopting D instead.