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This is an incredibly useful tool. I have a large C codebase for an embedded device, and I've often thought about the work involved in one day porting it to Em

This is an incredibly useful tool. I have a large C codebase for an embedded device, and I've often thought about the work involved in one day porting it to Embedded Linux with a higher level & safer language. This kind of tool is a game changer.

brabel 4y ago
The transpiled Go code seems to end up having to use lots of unsafe code, as even this little sample shows... it would probably be impossible to translate C without doing that. Is the resulting binary actually memory safe in any meaningful way, or even safer than the original C?
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  The unsafe parts, surely not. That's not entirely the point though. Dropping a dependency on C is a big deal in Go: faster calls, no CGO means faster builds and static binaries. Go also let's you hand-write assembly and link it in, usually for performance reasons, which very much lacks safety guarantees, but has proven to be incredibly useful for optimizing hot code paths.
turminal 4y ago
Unfortunately a lot of embedded devices can't handle the size of go executables.
- randomdata 4y ago
  The gc compiler produces notoriously large executables but Go programs need not be so large. A small program compiled using the tinygo compiler can be as small as 10s of kilobytes.
  - Fnoord 4y ago
    Someone even developed a complete SOHO router in Go: Router7 [1]. [1] https://router7.org/ https://router7.org/
    - m45t3r 4y ago
      This certainly doesn't look like a embedded device though: > The reference hardware platform is the PC Engines™ apu2c4 system board. It features a 1 GHz quad core amd64 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, 3 Ethernet ports and a DB9 serial port.
      - p_l 4y ago
        "Embedded" has no relationship with size, though. And that's moderately big for "embedded" anyway.
      - detaro 4y ago
        That's an embedded device, sure. Embedded doesn't mean "microcontroller only".
        m45t3r 4y ago
        I didn't mean to imply this. I consider most router hardware embedded, but they includes CPUs. It is just that they're CPUs that you would generally consider embedded (like a SoC). And BTW, my reply was mostly because of the context: people were talking about binary sizes for Go, but if you're using PC-like hardware you wouldn't care about binary sizes anyway (you can simply put more storage, even something like a 1GB SD Card would be way bigger than something like OpenWRT that can run with hardware as low as 8MB of Flash memory).

brabel 4y ago

The transpiled Go code seems to end up having to use lots of unsafe code, as even this little sample shows... it would probably be impossible to translate C without doing that. Is the resulting binary actually memory safe in any meaningful way, or even safer than the original C?

xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
The unsafe parts, surely not. That's not entirely the point though. Dropping a dependency on C is a big deal in Go: faster calls, no CGO means faster builds and static binaries. Go also let's you hand-write assembly and link it in, usually for performance reasons, which very much lacks safety guarantees, but has proven to be incredibly useful for optimizing hot code paths.

turminal 4y ago

Unfortunately a lot of embedded devices can't handle the size of go executables.

randomdata 4y ago
The gc compiler produces notoriously large executables but Go programs need not be so large. A small program compiled using the tinygo compiler can be as small as 10s of kilobytes.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Someone even developed a complete SOHO router in Go: Router7 [1]. [1] https://router7.org/ https://router7.org/
  - m45t3r 4y ago
    This certainly doesn't look like a embedded device though: > The reference hardware platform is the PC Engines™ apu2c4 system board. It features a 1 GHz quad core amd64 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, 3 Ethernet ports and a DB9 serial port.
    - p_l 4y ago
      "Embedded" has no relationship with size, though. And that's moderately big for "embedded" anyway.
    - detaro 4y ago
      That's an embedded device, sure. Embedded doesn't mean "microcontroller only".
      - m45t3r 4y ago
        I didn't mean to imply this. I consider most router hardware embedded, but they includes CPUs. It is just that they're CPUs that you would generally consider embedded (like a SoC). And BTW, my reply was mostly because of the context: people were talking about binary sizes for Go, but if you're using PC-like hardware you wouldn't care about binary sizes anyway (you can simply put more storage, even something like a 1GB SD Card would be way bigger than something like OpenWRT that can run with hardware as low as 8MB of Flash memory).