bloaty VS TinyGo

ESP32s aren't really ‘lower level’ in the sense that anyone is likely to write assembly code for them (compared to, say, 8051 or PIC), other than maybe some driver author at Espressif. The big win from using RISC-V, other than name recognition, is mainstream compiler support (which is nothing to sneeze at, especially when it's largely funded by someone else).

When I worked on Matter¹, the Xtensa and RISC-V versions were basically fungible from the software point of view. (And really, so were other vendors' various ARMs.) We did find that Bloaty McBloatface² didn't support Xtensa, so I had to write an alternative.

¹ https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip/

² https://github.com/google/bloaty

I’ve gotten good insight into what takes up space in binaries by profiling with Bloaty (https://github.com/google/bloaty). My last profiling session showed that clang’s ThinLTO was inlining too aggressively in some cases, causing functions that should be tiny to be 75 kB+.

I'm surprised they didn't go for the binary size analysis tools like

https://github.com/google/bloaty

Or goweight.

I was able to shave a few % off our app binary with Bloaty. It’s pretty hard to use but once you figure out how to make regular expressions to properly classify things from your codebase, you can really visually analyze what your binary is composed of.

Bloaty

Reading through the documentation, you will understand why this plugin is called "tiny," i.e., the SDK uses the TinyGo compiler instead of the official Go compiler. You can read more about why this is the case on the SDK\'s overview page, but the TLDR version is that the Go compiler can only produce Wasm binaries that run in the browser.

Not only you can fit Go into a kernel, there is at least two products that do so.

TamaGo, used to write the firmware used in USB armory.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

TinyGo, which even has official Arduino and ARM support, and is sponsored by Google

https://tinygo.org/

Ah but that isn't proper Go! Well neither is the C code that is allowed to be used in typical kernel code, almost nothing from ISO C standard library is available, and usually plenty of compiler specific language extensions are used instead.

Reminds me of https://tinygo.org/ - a project that brings Golang to embedded devices, browser (wasm) contexts. Do you converge or diverge from that project?

You should also consider TinyGo. It can compile Go for the Pico, and is starting to get good device support.

Thankfully some folks completly ignored whatever the rest of the world thinks system programming is all about and created:

- TinyGo (https://tinygo.org/), which is acknowledged by people in the industry[0][1]

- TamaGo unikernel on USB Armory secure key (https://www.withsecure.com/de/solutions/innovative-security-...)

And then there is the question if writing compilers, assemblers, linkers is systems programming or not.

[0]-https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/08/28/tinygo-go-compiler-f...

[1]-https://twitter.com/ArmSoftwareDev/status/131680481331796787...

Have you seen TinyGo? In the case of embedded system I would probably still chose C over Rust if the system didn't support dynamic memory allocation, and most embedded systems do not.

>I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython

There's TinyGo as well. https://tinygo.org/