Show HN: TinyGo – LLVM-based Go compiler for microcontrollers • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: TinyGo – LLVM-based Go compiler for microcontrollers

#21

Post by crawshaw » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #20

stmw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually wouldn't expect Go to be considerably better in memory footprint (or other things) than "embedded" Java in embedded environments. Once you accept the idea of having GC, it puts some constraints on things. Of course, you can't compare "server java" with embedded java -- those are as different as TinyGo and "real" Go, if not more so...

Normal Go is a lot more memory efficient than normal Java, it has value types and no VM/JIT overhead. In my own measurements it was up to 50x times more memory efficient.

Also: UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 can make a surprising difference on memory use, especially if you interact with services in UTF-8 and so spend a lot of memory in Java copying back and forth.

Re: Show HN: TinyGo – LLVM-based Go compiler for microcontrollers

#22

Post by monocasa » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #13

jsolson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it's not strange to see WASM come up -- last weekend I was considering doing something even weirder: writing a WASM to Thumb2 AoT compiler so I could leverage Go's built-in WASM support. This project seems more immediately useful :)

Yeah, just wait until you see multiple megabytes of WASM instructions for tiny progs or the realize the team does not care about non-web targets. You're much better off leveraging Rust's WASM support for resource limited, non-web WASM targets.

https://github.com/alexcrichton/wasm-gc

Re: Show HN: TinyGo – LLVM-based Go compiler for microcontrollers

#23

Post by j1elo » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

akavel wrote: post #7

Didn't find it in the readme: does anyone know what general "level" of microcontrollers are the project author(s) hoping to target? I suppose that because of the Go spec already, the minimum required architecture must be at least 32bit?

Watch out because the bits don't necessarily state anything about the "level" of the microcontroller... at least in some cases. I'm currently writing code for a 32-bit AVR32 UC3C family chip, and that's for sure closer to an old-school 8-bit AVR than it is to a "full fledged" 32-bit ARM

Re: Show HN: TinyGo – LLVM-based Go compiler for microcontrollers

#24

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

aykevl wrote: post #8

akavel wrote: post #7

Didn't find it in the readme: does anyone know what general "level" of microcontrollers are the project author(s) hoping to target? I suppose that because of the Go spec already, the minimum required architecture must be at least 32bit?

Hi, I'm the author of the compiler. All backends supported by LLVM should be fairly easily supported by TinyGo. In fact, I've had the blinky example running on an Arduino a while back (8-bit, 2kB RAM, 32kB flash). There is nothing in the Go spec that requires a 32-bit system, just like there is nothing in the C standard that requires a 16-bit system (ints are at least 16 bits). The biggest obstacle is not the fact th…

[deleted]