3 ms·

I shouldn't bite... sigh. When writing interrupt service routines for serial communications on an obscure architecture with multiple heaps (one 16 bit addressa

I shouldn't bite... sigh. When writing interrupt service routines for serial communications on an obscure architecture with multiple heaps (one 16 bit addressable and one 32 bit addressable), I could have written 2000 lines of assembly. Instead, I used a system of assembly macros and wrote about 300 lines of that. When writing firmware in a C which lacked decent coroutines, I could have just made a giant while loop and put all of my logic in it. Instead, I wrote a quick implementation of coroutines, a scheduler, and a basic async/await implementation using the C preprocessor. This also saved thousands of lines of boilerplate code. The fact that C has no good method of implementing a generic hashmap has nothing to do with my proficiency in the language. My proficiency in C also has nothing to do with my love of sweet, glorious type inference, or my deep felt appreciation for the conveniences modern IDEs and languages provide. Writing software has never been better! Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but what I'm hearing is: "You don't need to use Vim to get more done, you just need to get better at typing. Not that I know anything about how fast you type." Or... you know, I could just use Vim.

linuxlizard 7y ago
Sounds like you rolled your own RTOS. Dang. Very nice!
- caseymarquis 7y ago
  Psh! I wish! Implementing cooroutines in C is pretty old hat: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html If you just put together a linked list of structs which represent the routines, the time they last slept, and what they're last waiting on, you can just iterate through it and you've got most of the functionality of async/await. I never bothered to implement separate stacks and register restoration, opting to just use global variables for state that needed to be saved between awaits. It would have been neat to do that, but I think it would have turned an afternoon spent saving time into a multiday project, and left me permanently paranoid about corrupting the stack or registers. Would have been fun though.
MisterTea 7y ago
> I shouldn't bite... sigh. That is not how your original post read to me. It sounded like you came from the dynamic/scripting language world and are trying to hammer those features into C. You sound quite proficient, I'm not trying to shit on you or anything. I'm tired, it's late, and no one cares but it sounds like you want something like an mbed that runs python or FreeRTOS? Why reinvent the wheel if someone already did this? Or is it simply that you're stuck using C on your "weird" platform? In that case, I'd say have a look at Nim, there's an embedded branch. It's a dynamic language that compiles to C89 so perhaps it's buildable on your platform. If it's a personal project then have fun.

linuxlizard 7y ago

Sounds like you rolled your own RTOS. Dang. Very nice!

caseymarquis 7y ago
Psh! I wish! Implementing cooroutines in C is pretty old hat: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html If you just put together a linked list of structs which represent the routines, the time they last slept, and what they're last waiting on, you can just iterate through it and you've got most of the functionality of async/await. I never bothered to implement separate stacks and register restoration, opting to just use global variables for state that needed to be saved between awaits. It would have been neat to do that, but I think it would have turned an afternoon spent saving time into a multiday project, and left me permanently paranoid about corrupting the stack or registers. Would have been fun though.

MisterTea 7y ago

> I shouldn't bite... sigh. That is not how your original post read to me. It sounded like you came from the dynamic/scripting language world and are trying to hammer those features into C. You sound quite proficient, I'm not trying to shit on you or anything. I'm tired, it's late, and no one cares but it sounds like you want something like an mbed that runs python or FreeRTOS? Why reinvent the wheel if someone already did this? Or is it simply that you're stuck using C on your "weird" platform? In that case, I'd say have a look at Nim, there's an embedded branch. It's a dynamic language that compiles to C89 so perhaps it's buildable on your platform. If it's a personal project then have fun.