Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly

12 comments

• $nasretdinov 3 hours ago

  Tinygo made a lot of progress over the years -- e.g. they've recently introduced macOS support!

  It does indeed produce much smaller binaries, including for macOS.

    yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time tinygo build -o test-tiny main.go
    
    ________________________________________________________
    Executed in    1.06 secs    fish           external
       usr time    1.18 secs    0.31 millis    1.18 secs
       sys time    0.18 secs    1.50 millis    0.18 secs
    
    yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time go build -o test-normal main.go
    
    ________________________________________________________
    Executed in   75.79 millis    fish           external
       usr time   64.06 millis    0.41 millis   63.64 millis
       sys time   96.76 millis    1.75 millis   95.01 millis
    
    yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> ll
    total 5096
    -rw-r--r--@ 1 yuriy  staff    74B  3 Apr 19:17 main.go
    -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy  staff   2.3M  3 Apr 19:18 test-normal*
    -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy  staff   192K  3 Apr 19:18 test-tiny*
    yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> cat main.go
    package main
    
    import "fmt"
    
    func main() {
            fmt.Printf("Hello world!\n")
    }

• $pancsta 6 minutes ago

  TinyGo doesnt have networking in WASI[0] and the WASM websocket module[1] was last updated 5 years ago. Go without stdlib is not Go.

  [0] https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/issues/4880

  [1] https://github.com/Nerzal/tinywebsocket

• $carverauto 2 hours ago

  We're using TinyGo and the Wazero runtime for our WASM plugin system in ServiceRadar, highly recommend both if you're using golang.

  [-]
  • $evacchi 2 hours ago

    Yay wazero maintainer here, thanks for the shout-out!

  • $apitman an hour ago

    Wazero is awesome. For anyone wanting to embed in languages other than Go, check out Extism.

• $mi_lk 30 minutes ago

  What are the tradeoffs compared to standard Go?

• $tatjam 2 hours ago

  Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?

  [-]
  • $nasretdinov 2 hours ago

    You can disable GC in tinygo, so if you allocate all the necessary buffers beforehand it can have good performance with real-time characteristics. If you _need_ dynamic memory allocation then no, because you need GC it can't provide realtime guarantees.

    [-]
    • $Groxx 2 minutes ago

      [delayed]

  • $carverauto 2 hours ago

    We're streaming RSTP camera feeds through WASM plugins and host-bridge adapters, no problem. I was surprised how well it worked TBH.

    https://code.carverauto.dev/carverauto/serviceradar/src/bran...

  • $clktmr 2 hours ago

    I've written a fair amount of code for EmbeddedGo. Garbage Collector is not an issue if you avoid heap allocations in your main loop. But if you're CPU bound a goroutine might block others from running for quite some time. If your platform supports async preemption, you might be able to patch the goroutine scheduler with realtime capabilities.

  • $randusername an hour ago

    Can you elaborate on this and how it would be different from signaling on interrupts and DMA?

    Hardware-level async makes sense to me. I can scope it. I can read the data sheet.

    Software async in contrast seems difficult to characterize and reason about so I've been intimidated.