Is Go a suitable candidate for embedded development?

[Bob Deschambault]

Hi,

I have just started to find out about go, and I was wondering if it is
a good candidate for embedded development? The fast compiles and
links would be extemely useful, and writing robust programs a must.
Would it still work well in environments with simpler 32-bit
processors used in embedded development which may not have
multicores? Any thoughts about this?

Thanks,

Bob

[Ian Lance Taylor]

This has come up on the list a couple of times. I think the main
issue is that Go has a runtime which is substantially larger than the
C runtime, which would take up space. And of course it would have to
be ported to any new system of interest.

Ian

[Bob Deschambault]

On Nov 12, 11:44 pm, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com> wrote:

> Bob Deschambault <robert.deschamba...@gmail.com> writes:
> > I have just started to find out about go, and I was wondering if it is

> > a good candidate forembeddeddevelopment?  The fast compiles and

> > links would be extemely useful, and writing robust programs a must.
> > Would it still work well in environments with simpler 32-bit

> > processors used inembeddeddevelopment which may not have

> > multicores?  Any thoughts about this?
>
> This has come up on the list a couple of times.  I think the main
> issue is that Go has a runtime which is substantially larger than the
> C runtime, which would take up space.  And of course it would have to
> be ported to any new system of interest.
>
> Ian

Thanks for the input. The systems I am thinking of are employed in
space-science intruments which may have considerable resources in
terms of processors and memory. There are some space-qualified
multicore processors and fairly large memory resources, perhaps along
the size of 256MB to 1GB. How hard would a port to a SPARC 8 or
PowerPC architecture (for example) be?

Bob

[Ian Lance Taylor]

A port using gccgo should be fairly straightforward at the moment,
though it may get harder as the runtime improves.

A port using 6g/8g would require pulling forward the Sparc and PowerPC
code generation into the Go world. I don't myself know how difficult
that would be.

Ian