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by RetroTechie 20 days ago
Out of curiosity:

In your opinion, could a minimal system to develop in Odin be squeezed into a device like the one(s) you targeted?

That's assuming maybe some tweaks to the toolset, doing without some niceties, but not cutting core features out of the language.

Asking 'cause I have a passing interest in programming languages that allow for native development on really small implementations (think sub-1MB on bare metal). The list of candidates doesn't seem long.

1 comments

Odin is not like JS or something where you'd need a VM or transpilation process to target an embedded system. It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures, there's no "squeezing" required. You just compile for the target you want to run on.

Here's a UI framework, if you scroll down you'll see it on a Raspi Pico: https://github.com/MadlyFX/Ansuz

I think you missed "native development". I'll rephrase:

Could a toolset to develop in Odin be made to run on (not just target) an STM32 microcontroller like you used?

> It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures

That suggests the above would (in theory) be possible for any device that's roughly in the same class as "can run a C compiler". Correct?

> It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures

it's not, it's llvm

Okay, I mean obviously :D I was more trying to convey the feeling of it.
> STM32 microcontroller

The answer is "yes" depending on what you mean by STM32 :D

But if it's one we don't currently support officially, it should be pretty easy to support too, with probably a little extra assembly.