On 25/04/2015 5:07 p.m., Jens Bauer wrote:
On Saturday, 25 April 2015 at 04:21:06 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
The STM peripheral library really sux, verbose boilerplate for the
simplest stuff and no type safety for the enums (find the difference
of GPIO_PIN4 and GPIO_PinSource4 via debugging).
I couldn't agree more. I especially hate the fact that pointers have to
be type-casted into uint32_t!
I know, I know.. It's always 32-bit on the Cortex-M microcontrollers,
but ... it would make it easier to make a sandbox application or some
test-suite running on a computer, if not having to type-cast everything.
It's also really hard to setup all the startup files, linker scripts
and debugger configs.
In constrast we could provide a really amazing D experience on those
platforms.
D is really suitable for microcontrollers; especially because classes no
longer cost a payload of memory. This will allow us to make neat
User-Interface objects easily, where a minimal UI library would be 5K in
C++. I also hope that associative arrays and strings will fit most
microcontrollers. I know that there might be problems, when we have
little RAM available. I do not know how little memory is realistic at
the moment; here I'm especially thinking about fragmentation and the use
of the 'new' keyword.
I hope to find a good way to use import for microcontroller libraries,
so it'll be easy for everyone. I'm thinking about something like ...
import mcu.stm32f439.all
Ugh, package.d?
... and I'm hoping to have this in a shared location instead of
including the library in every source file like it's usually done in C
and C++ based projects. But I will wait and see what the more
experienced D)everlopers recommend. ;)
While I remember it ... I had to nullify a number of imports in stdint.
They simply do not belong in there. :)
Eg. I do not want FILE* if I aks for stdint. But FILE* is forced upon
me, because wchar_t includes it. What does a wchar_t need a file-system
for ?
Things like these might need a slight cleanup at some point (because
normally, you don't have a file system on a microcontroller; thus you
will get errors, when trying to import a simple file like stdint).
