D for embedded system

[Iain Buclaw]

On 20 October 2012 09:23, Timo Sintonen <t.sintonen at luukku.com> wrote:
>>
>> Nobody has used GDC/D/druntime on a system without OS afaik. So you
>> have to pioneer ;-)
>
>
> So I have to try it on my own...
>
>
>> * Create your own, simple runtime library. There's no real
>>   documentation on the minimum interface a runtime must implement (the
>>   compiler calls back into the runtime), so this would be a little
>>   tricky.
>
>
> I have already made some tests:
>
> I compiled a simple class without any library. The missing symbols tell me
> what is the minimum that is expected to be in Object class.
>
> I tried to compile an empty Object class. There is some problems because
> Object seems to be a reserved word in gdc. The biggest problem is that gdc
> gets an internal error every time I try to compile my own Object. If this is
> an unknown bug in gdc, I may look it again. (an internal compiler error is
> always a bug, isn't it?)
>
>
>> * Adjust druntime. You can probably throw out 90% of the druntime code
>
>
> I compiled object.d without imports and commented out everything that failed
> the compilation. There is still some missing symbols but I think this
> version would not work anyway.
>
> I have a working glibc, newlib and my own minimum libc. So I would follow
> the linux version as far as possible. Because Linux is a reserved word I
> changed with sed all the linux version checks to another word and got nearly
> all compiled. First time I got over 400 lines of missisng symbols but I
> could see what functions are expected from the c library.
>
>>
>>
>> Your biggest
>>   problem is probably the GC and TLS.
>
>
> To be more general, the library should have a minimum version with no
> threads and gc and be configurable to have them. In controller world
> resources are limited. We talk about kilobytes when pc people talk about
> gigabytes. The advantage is that everything is usually fixed and known at
> design time. Memory is usually allocated once and kept as long as the device
> is operating. The same is for threads. Threads are initiated at startup and
> have only one instance. They keep running as long as the device is
> operating. In the threading system I use now the main loop of each thread is
> run once and at the end of the loop control is returned to the scheduler
> which jumps to the next thread.
>
> So the application can run without gc and tls. On the other hand, the amount
> of threads is known. It is even possible to hardcode tls address for every
> thread if needed. Memory pool and stack are also in fixed addresses and all
> pointers are available. So the low level stuff would be quite simple. The
> biggest job is to get it work with the higher level code.
>
>

Quick question,  what is defined in your phobos-vers-syms file?  (This
will be located in the libphobos / libdruntime build directory).

Regards
-- 
Iain Buclaw

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