What is the state of Microcontroller support in d?

[Mike via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 20 June 2017 at 12:32:46 UTC, Dan Walmsley wrote:

> If we push to have this fixed after that we are pretty close to 
> having something usable are we not?

Depends on your definition of "usable".  Fixing the bloat issue 
would remove a current road block, and at least allow progress to 
continue.

IMO, to make D a pleasant experience on the ARM Cortex-M 
platform, we'll need to implement the entire druntime including 
threading, GC, exceptions, dynamic arrays, etc... even if those 
features are not used.  This is because D just hasn't been 
designed and implemented in a modular fashion to allow one to 
pay-as-they-go, and as you experienced in one of your other posts 
today, you just get too many undefined references and other odd 
errors that have nothing to do with your code.  The only way to 
make those errors go away is to ensure everything in druntime is 
there.

If the bloat problem were solved, we could at least continue 
working towards that end.  But it's not immediately apparent to 
me how much overhead a complete runtime implementation will add 
to as simple microcontroller application, and how well the 
compiler and linker can optimize and remove that overhead.  We 
may encounter other roadblocks like I did with the TypeInfo 
bloat, and have to fight a major battle to get something done 
about it.

But I don't want to have to implement the entire druntime in 
order to start making progress.  It shouldn't have to be that way.

Mike