svd2nim
zig
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
svd2nim
-
Memory-mapped IO registers in Zig. (2021)
Nim's maintainer agrees with you I believe, and the API is as you suggest (volatileLoad and volatileStore): https://nim-lang.org/docs/volatile.html
However, under the hood, Nim compiles to C. So these are macros that typecast to volatile, does the read (or write), then casts back to non-volatile.
(Small plug for my nim project that is somewhat related to OP: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim)
-
New embedded programming language with C as a host language
C++ has decent industry acceptance in embedded nowadays, or at least that has been my impression.
After C++, rust is likely the most popular, quite a lot of effort has been put into running rust on embedded, see eg https://github.com/rust-embedded. However, once again to my understanding, industry acceptance is still highly marginal.
After that, there's a bunch of toy-ish efforts to run other languages. Zig, nim, python and javascript variants, etc. Usually anything that has C ABI compatibility should be possible to get up and running (without writing a compiler backend from scratch). I've had fun with some toy projects using nim for ARM cortex-M targets (https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim, https://github.com/auxym/nim-on-samd21, https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/picostdlib).
Using Nim (and eg svd2nim to generate the equivalent of CMSIS headers for register access in pure nim), it would be entirely possible to write even the low level stuff (SPI drivers and whatnot) in 100% nim, with the same performance as C and better safety (better static type system and compile-time checks, etc). Runtime (eg overflow) checks and garbage collection are available (at the cost of some performance) but optional. See eg. a pretty basic higher-level API for GPIO access, that provides native performance, since the abstraction is implemented as macros (compile-time abstraction): https://github.com/auxym/nim-on-samd21/blob/master/src/port....
-
specify address of a variable
Any chance your MCU is ARM? If so check out my project to generate the register mappings from CMSIS SVD files: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim
-
Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
To be clear: Ratel isn't my project, just something I'm following due to interest.
In the interest of shameless self promotion :), my own experimentations are :
https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim
https://github.com/auxym/nim-on-samd21
And I've used and contributed to picostdlib (https://github.com/beef331/picostdlib), the rp2040 support library.
All just as a hobby, but it's interesting to learn that some companies are actually looking into Nim for firmware! Embedded seems like such a slow moving industry. I believe the author of Nesper and Nephyr also developed them for professional work.
- Ask HN: What's Your Side Project?
-
An Embedded USB Device Stack in Ada
Many vendors provide svd files which describe the hardware registers. It's possible to convert the svd automatically like they do for C. Here's an example for Nim [1]. Rust has one as well.
Though I agree that MCU's currently involve a lot of busy work. It's why I'm working on building a nice system building on Zephyr using Nim [2]. It's pretty great to write a few dozen lines of concise memory safe code to do somethinguseful, and then be able to run it on dozens different MCUs.
It'd be great if there was more Ada core in these systems, as Zephyr is all built in C. At least it's modern clean C and well tested.
1: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim
-
Writing embedded firmware using Rust
If you're curious, I have this in MVP status at the moment: https://github.com/auxym/svd2nim
zig
-
Memory-mapped IO registers in Zig. (2021)
There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284
- Zig Programming Language
- Zig Language 0.12 Release
-
Zig 0.12.0 Release Notes
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224
e.g.:
> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.
-
How to Write a PHP Extension with Zig?
When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).
-
Bun - The One Tool for All Your JavaScript/Typescript Project's Needs?
NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.
-
Bun 1.1
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()
There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894
- Zig, Rust, and Other Languages
-
Nanos – A Unikernel
Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]
[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
- Ask HN: What Underrated Open Source Project Deserves More Recognition?
What are some alternatives?
rp2040_hal - Ada drivers for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 SoC
Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).
probe-run - Run embedded programs just like native ones
Odin - Odin Programming Language
picostdlib - Nim wrapper for the raspberry pi stdlib
v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io
kcgi - minimal CGI and FastCGI library for C/C++
rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
nephyr - Nim wrapper for Zephyr
go - The Go programming language
dotfile - Simple version control made for tracking single files
ssr-proxy-js - A Server-Side Rendering Proxy focused on customization and flexibility!