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So we're gonna be stuck writing a precambrian prototype language till the end of time because there's so much legacy code already written in it? Never seemed to

So we're gonna be stuck writing a precambrian prototype language till the end of time because there's so much legacy code already written in it? Never seemed to stop people moving from Pascal, or Perl or literally all other languages that are now obsolete. I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython, I mean how about some fucking middle ground instead of two polar opposites? At least eventually everything will be rewritten in Rust I guess.

Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
>I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython There's TinyGo as well. https://tinygo.org/ https://tinygo.org/ I'd say that's the middle ground for me.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  It is nice, but nowhere near as complete feature-wise than C/C++. The fact that it exists does not mean you can use it to achieve the same thing.
  - Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
    What do you mean no where near as complete feature wise? Go or specifically the TinyGo implementation? Seems to do exactly what 99% of people need.
    - stowaway1256 3y ago
      Feature parity is fine but support is not quite there. Doesn't support WiFi on NodeMCU boards last I checked.
    - rcarmo 3y ago
      "Seems" is an outside perspective. There are loads of hardware features that it just doesn't support on various boards, and lots of extra hardware (like sensors) that it has no libraries for. It's not just the MCU/CPU that matters here.
- varjag 3y ago
  There's a niche doing C++ (vs. straight C) on microcontrollers but the rest are just tinkerer choices.
hnlmorg 3y ago
> Never seemed to stop people moving from Pascal, or Perl or literally all other languages that are now obsolete. Operating systems written in Pascal are now obsolete. OSs in C are not. Perl is much easier to replace because fewer things were dependent on it however even here Perl 5.x still pops up all over the place.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Yeah to my great annoyance I did have to grep for an ipv4 address with a perl regex the other day. But for any actual scripting it's basically dead.
  - enriquto 3y ago
    > for any actual scripting it's basically dead. Run "file /usr/bin/* | grep -i perl | wc -l" on your computer. You will be surprised. EDIT: if you want a histogram for all the types of programs in your system, run this file -bL /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1-3 | sort | uniq -c | sort
stowaway1256 3y ago
Isn't Lua middle-ground enough? Alternatively you can write it in V and transpile to C.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
davidhyde 3y ago
Embedded Rust has been a viable option for at least 4 years now and especially so for the past 2 years. I really dislike having to learn the quirks of building, configuring and navigating typical embedded c based projects. They always seem to have an excessive amount of tiny files (in various languages) all over the place with obscure heuristics only the original authors know about. IMO, to build anything new your only reasonable option is to blindly copy and paste an example project and hack away. I’ve never been able to “start from scratch”. An embedded Rust project is the same as a normal Rust project except that you mark it as not linking the standard library !#[no_std] and you define a main entry point and panic behaviour (there are helper crates for this). You can still use the core and alloc crates which give you pretty much everything you need in an embedded system like strings and vectors. You also get to use modern tooling like vs code and rust-analyser instead of a different antiquated version of Eclipse for each hardware vendor. I don’t think that Rust should only be used for big projects. You can use it for small projects and you really don’t need to get complicated with generics for application code. You need to put in the effort to get a fundamental understanding about what the borrow checker is trying to achieve and the rest may be easier than you think.
- shrubble 3y ago
  While it seems Rust supports ARM devices like M0, M4 and of course more powerful chips like those capable of running Linux, there are huge swathes of chips that it doesn't support like 8051, PIC etc.
pkkm 3y ago
> I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython Why wouldn't you just use C for programming a microcontroller? Sure, it's not a great language for web backends, but microcontrollers are where it shines. You're probably not deploying 100,000 lines to a microcontroller for a personal project, so the lack of certain abstractions isn't going to be that painful. On the other hand, C lets you make the latency and memory usage 100% predictable, which can be a great asset.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Why wouldn't you use assembly for programming a microcontroller? Sure, it's not a great language for web backends but microcontrollers are where it shines. /s Because as the OP states, it's an objectively (pun intended) terribly abstracted language. There is nothing 100% predictable about C except that you'll eventually get screwed because you didn't account for some random obscure thing that should never have even been possible to do. Any language that allows using static variables can have predictable memory consumption. There is nothing inherent to it that makes it better than a language that works at the same level but built to modern standards, except the piles upon piles of legacy code you can use.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    Enable max warning level, use a static analyzer, and ASAN, UBSAN and TSAN (in order of importance), and most problems you listed just disappear. Most importantly though: don't use MSVC if you have the choice.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Yeah if you want to kill yourself from frustrations, maybe. I'm not writing microcontroller code for the fucking space shuttle, and I would suspect most people aren't. C did a ton of things right, but it also did a ton of things wrong. Learning from that and moving on would be the sensible thing to do after 50 years.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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tharne 3y ago
> At least eventually everything will be rewritten in Rust I guess. This is the new "Year of the Linux Desktop".
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> So we're gonna be stuck writing a precambrian prototype language till the end of time because there's so much legacy code already written in it? Yes. Unless somebody steps up and rewrites everything in Rust or Lisp or whatever, that's exactly what's going to happen. Lack of backwards compatibility with existing software will condemn programming languages to irrelevance on day one.

Philip-J-Fry 3y ago

>I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython There's TinyGo as well. https://tinygo.org/ https://tinygo.org/ I'd say that's the middle ground for me.

rcarmo 3y ago
It is nice, but nowhere near as complete feature-wise than C/C++. The fact that it exists does not mean you can use it to achieve the same thing.
- Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
  What do you mean no where near as complete feature wise? Go or specifically the TinyGo implementation? Seems to do exactly what 99% of people need.
  - stowaway1256 3y ago
    Feature parity is fine but support is not quite there. Doesn't support WiFi on NodeMCU boards last I checked.
  - rcarmo 3y ago
    "Seems" is an outside perspective. There are loads of hardware features that it just doesn't support on various boards, and lots of extra hardware (like sensors) that it has no libraries for. It's not just the MCU/CPU that matters here.
varjag 3y ago
There's a niche doing C++ (vs. straight C) on microcontrollers but the rest are just tinkerer choices.

hnlmorg 3y ago

> Never seemed to stop people moving from Pascal, or Perl or literally all other languages that are now obsolete. Operating systems written in Pascal are now obsolete. OSs in C are not. Perl is much easier to replace because fewer things were dependent on it however even here Perl 5.x still pops up all over the place.

moffkalast 3y ago
Yeah to my great annoyance I did have to grep for an ipv4 address with a perl regex the other day. But for any actual scripting it's basically dead.
- enriquto 3y ago
  > for any actual scripting it's basically dead. Run "file /usr/bin/* | grep -i perl | wc -l" on your computer. You will be surprised. EDIT: if you want a histogram for all the types of programs in your system, run this file -bL /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1-3 | sort | uniq -c | sort

stowaway1256 3y ago

Isn't Lua middle-ground enough? Alternatively you can write it in V and transpile to C.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

davidhyde 3y ago

Embedded Rust has been a viable option for at least 4 years now and especially so for the past 2 years. I really dislike having to learn the quirks of building, configuring and navigating typical embedded c based projects. They always seem to have an excessive amount of tiny files (in various languages) all over the place with obscure heuristics only the original authors know about. IMO, to build anything new your only reasonable option is to blindly copy and paste an example project and hack away. I’ve never been able to “start from scratch”. An embedded Rust project is the same as a normal Rust project except that you mark it as not linking the standard library !#[no_std] and you define a main entry point and panic behaviour (there are helper crates for this). You can still use the core and alloc crates which give you pretty much everything you need in an embedded system like strings and vectors. You also get to use modern tooling like vs code and rust-analyser instead of a different antiquated version of Eclipse for each hardware vendor. I don’t think that Rust should only be used for big projects. You can use it for small projects and you really don’t need to get complicated with generics for application code. You need to put in the effort to get a fundamental understanding about what the borrow checker is trying to achieve and the rest may be easier than you think.

shrubble 3y ago
While it seems Rust supports ARM devices like M0, M4 and of course more powerful chips like those capable of running Linux, there are huge swathes of chips that it doesn't support like 8051, PIC etc.

pkkm 3y ago

> I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython Why wouldn't you just use C for programming a microcontroller? Sure, it's not a great language for web backends, but microcontrollers are where it shines. You're probably not deploying 100,000 lines to a microcontroller for a personal project, so the lack of certain abstractions isn't going to be that painful. On the other hand, C lets you make the latency and memory usage 100% predictable, which can be a great asset.

moffkalast 3y ago
Why wouldn't you use assembly for programming a microcontroller? Sure, it's not a great language for web backends but microcontrollers are where it shines. /s Because as the OP states, it's an objectively (pun intended) terribly abstracted language. There is nothing 100% predictable about C except that you'll eventually get screwed because you didn't account for some random obscure thing that should never have even been possible to do. Any language that allows using static variables can have predictable memory consumption. There is nothing inherent to it that makes it better than a language that works at the same level but built to modern standards, except the piles upon piles of legacy code you can use.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Enable max warning level, use a static analyzer, and ASAN, UBSAN and TSAN (in order of importance), and most problems you listed just disappear. Most importantly though: don't use MSVC if you have the choice.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Yeah if you want to kill yourself from frustrations, maybe. I'm not writing microcontroller code for the fucking space shuttle, and I would suspect most people aren't. C did a ton of things right, but it also did a ton of things wrong. Learning from that and moving on would be the sensible thing to do after 50 years.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tharne 3y ago

> At least eventually everything will be rewritten in Rust I guess. This is the new "Year of the Linux Desktop".

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> So we're gonna be stuck writing a precambrian prototype language till the end of time because there's so much legacy code already written in it? Yes. Unless somebody steps up and rewrites everything in Rust or Lisp or whatever, that's exactly what's going to happen. Lack of backwards compatibility with existing software will condemn programming languages to irrelevance on day one.