GSOC - Holiday Edition

[Mike via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 4 January 2015 at 17:25:49 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:

> Exceptions on MC sounds like a bad idea,

That is a bias of old.  It is entirely dependent on the 
application.  Many modern uses of microcontrollers are not hard 
real-time, and while my work was primarily on ARM 
microcontrollers, my previous comments were about using D for 
bare-metal and systems programming in general.

> Last time I build an embedded ARM project the resulting D 
> binary was as small as the C++ one.

Yes, my "Hello World!" was 56 bytes, but, it's not only about 
getting something to work.

> A group of people that builds the infrastructure is needed.
>
> I can't strictly follow your conclusion, that half of the 
> language needs to be change.
> The only thing I needed to do last time, was to disable 
> ModuleInfo generation in the compiler.

My conclusion is not that half the language needs to change.  As 
I said in a previous post, the changes needed are likely few, but 
fundamental, and can't be implemented in infrastructure alone if 
you want the result to be more than "Hey, I got it to work".

The original thread prompting this discussion was about having a 
bare-metal GSOC project.  As I and others have shown, such a 
project is possible, interesting, entertaining and educational, 
but it will always be just that without 
language/compiler/toolchain support.

A more worthwhile GSOC project would be to add those few, yet 
fundamental, language/compiler/toolchain changes to make the 
experience feel like the language was designed with intent for 
the purpose of systems programming.  But I don't think that will 
be of much interest to embedded/kernel/bare-metal programmers, 
but rather more for those with an interest in language and 
compiler design.

Mike