usbarmory VS TinyGo

Niklaus Wirth, rest his soul, would disagree.

Like would the the selling USB Armory, with Go written firmware.

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

Back in my day, writing compilers and OS services were also systems programming.

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.

> Since 80s everybody designs systems on top of C.

More like since the 1990's, and mostly thanks to the GNU Manifesto and FOSS uptake that took the steam out of C++ adoption being pushed by Apple, IBM and Microsoft.

There is firmware in production written in Go,

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

Not exactly but close. No gocoin, but custom (minimal) client based on btcsuite libs. And it is run on USB Armory SoC.

Relocking with your own key is only for experts, it's similar to the USB Armory device for embedded electronics. If you get it wrong you can brick the device, the purpose of doing it is to protect against certain types of boot attacks (like if somebody can get temporary physical access to your phone or even just plant a malicious USB cable which could potentially push malware. If you don't know what you're doing, stay on stock OS.

Plenty of software that is written in C and C++, can be easily done in Go as well, in fact in any AOT compiled managed language.

C++ was born to write distributed systems, nowadays it hardly matters on cloud native infrastructure beyond the OS and hypervisors layer.

This is how Go can be a competitor to C and C++, just like Inferno was basically Plan 9 with Limbo for userspace and very little C beyond the kernel.

And then there are those crazy folks that believe they should ship bare metal AOT compiled languages regardless of others think.

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

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

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/

Gist link fixed, thanks. Compared to TinyGo, Go with GOOS=wasip1 will probably generate larger artifacts (at least, for now). This is because it bundles the entire Go runtime. The benefit is that it fully supports goroutine scheduling and non-blocking I/O. TinyGo (I believe) still uses a custom asyncify pass and does not support non-blocking I/O nor basic WASI networking (e.g. https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/pull/2748 never landed, but GOOS=wasip1 supports it).