On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 18:14:30 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
If I am not mistaken, many of the C compilers for such environments are limited on what is actually possible to use from ANSI C.
From what I've heard D is 32- and 64-bits only, so that actually leaves things like ARM, MIPS, AVR32 and such cores, these usually have really good GCC support, so I guess there are no "special" limits... It also depends on what you mean by "ANSI C" - for example for ARM, GCC and newlib's libc you basically have everything [; Things that are "OS-dependent" - like malloc(), stdio functions (printf(), ...) and stuff like that require you to provide "re-targeting syscalls" (like sbrk(), write(), read(), ...) but that's not a big issue [;
You basically have whole libstdc++ too (from GCC), with all the templates, containers, iterators and stuff, plus typical C++ stuff - exceptions, RTTI, new, delete etc. - some of these things depend on the syscalls I mentioned above, some of these features take just too much memory [;
So I guess that 32-bit microcontrollers are really standards-compliant! (;
True, although in my naïve opinion, I would expect such systems to still be developed in Assembly.
Do you mean controllers for 100-tonne crane of maybe just "general embedded microcontroller"? I guess that no one would go so low for things that can be done in C with a cheap chip like Cortex-M0 [;
Faire enough, I guess even C has issues on those systems right?
If we stick to ARM (like Cortex-M3) there are no issues other than memory limitations, and it generally concerns mostly RAM, as code memory is usually big enough (hundreds of kB usually, up to 512kB, sometimes 1MB). That's why you cannot get too fancy with your code, and - unfortunately - most of nice programming "tricks" are dynamic-memory-only...
On the other hand, maybe I should ask what do you consider "an issue"? There's definitely nothing "non-standard" in the C/C++ that you use here - there's just no OS (but you can have an RTOS - scheduler), no POSIX (but there are POSIX-like RTOSes) and not-a-lot of RAM (there's no library for fixing that [; ).
4\/3!!
