tamago VS TinyGo

There's two major production-ready Go-based operating system(-ish) projects:

- Google's gVisor[1] (a re-implementation of a significant subset of the Linux syscall ABI for isolation, also mentioned in the article)

- USBArmory's Tamago[2] (a single-threaded bare-metal Go runtime for SOCs)

Both of these are security-focused with a clear trade off: sacrifice some performance for memory safe and excellent readability (and auditability). I feel like that's the sweet spot for low-level Go - projects that need memory safety but would rather trade some performance for simplicity.

[1]: https://github.com/google/gvisor

[2]: https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

Of course it can, there are companies shipping products written in bare metal Go.

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

https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

For comparison, what are the differences in goals and approach with Tamago? https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

I've been keeping an eye on TinyGo (Go compiler that targets microcontrollers and uses LLVM) and also TamaGo (allows you to run Go on bare metal, without any C dependency).

If you want to go deeper, there is also bare-metal Go runtime for rpi (among others): https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/tamago

> just proves your lack of knowledge

Tone is not needed.

For TamaGo, it seems to allow developers run their application, not build an OS on the hardware. But I have not played with it, you are right.

> TamaGo is a framework that enables compilation and execution of unencumbered Go applications on bare metal

The environment does not seem to allow building a generic operating system [1]. F-Secure ported the runtime itself to boot natively. But please correct me.

> There is no thread support

The environment you run in is specifically curated for Go applications, such as the memory layout. I'd call this an "appliance" rather than enabling Go to be used for full-fledged generic operating system implementations.

[1] https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/tamago/wiki/Internals

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/