On Friday, 3 April 2015 at 16:41:14 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
On Friday, 3 April 2015 at 15:07:57 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 4/3/15 3:10 AM, Andrea Fontana wrote:
It would be great to have dmd on embedded platforms.
I agree. We just don't have the champion for that yet. --
Andrei
I might obviously be biased, but to be honest I don't see much
value in starting to port a largely obsolete backend to a whole
new processor architecture.
I see a benefit in bringing DMD to an embedded platform: To
suggest, experiment with, and introduce changes to the
frontend/runtime that benefit all compilers and embedded
development in D. Such a task isn't one for an embedded
champion, however, it needs a compiler champion. We can't really
get serious about building embedded systems in D until there is
better compiler/runtime support.
There are two impediments to this:
(1) A strategy identifying a way forward. How do we modularize
the language, and how do we implement that modularization? My
suggestions have not been very popular, but I enthusiastically
welcome suggestions.
(2) Compiler hacking skills necessary to implement those changes
without stirring the aversion to change.
I have worked on this, but I failed while trying to modify the
compiler, and I've been discouraged by suggestions that we don't
want to "shuffle the deck". Perhaps in the next few months I'll
try to get some conversations started around this, but I'm still
exploring other alternatives at the moment.
Also, there may not be any need for changes to the backend. The
Intel Galileo [1] is a Pentium-based Quark MCU [2], and the Intel
Edison [3] is a dual-core Atom CPU. Walter already said he
thinks DMD might be able to program the Quark. These aren't
really "micro"controllers as they have an abundance of resources
compared to the ARM Cortex-M and Atmel AVRs, but it has it's
place in the ecosystem.
Also, there is no reason one can't use their desktop PC to
experiment. I see modularization of the language benefiting all
domains, and I think if it existed, we'd see those features
exploited in many interesting ways.
Mike
[1] - Intel Galileo -
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/galileo-maker-quark-board.html
[2] - Intel Quark -
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/quark/intel-quark-technologies.html
[3] - Intel Edison -
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/edison.html
