While we're talking about this sort of architecture, I'd like to plug Elixir. For some development hardware, we had Elixir running on the ARM of a Zynq Ultrasc

While we're talking about this sort of architecture, I'd like to plug Elixir. For some development hardware, we had Elixir running on the ARM of a Zynq Ultrascale, running in tandem with some digital logic. It required one C code "port" that integrated with UIO to expose the registers to our application and then we had a great programming environment. Elixir for embedded doesn't get talked about that much, but that is actually the origin story of Erlang (software component of telephony hardware). Basic language features like binary pattern matching work very well, and the concurrency approach makes it very easy to write clean performant real-time software. We had a lot of functionality that did used digital logic and then had the stateful stuff in software and it worked very well. Plus, I could then do stuff like trivially spin up a Web UI with a graphical display of all the register state, that updated live (Phoenix LiveView). And be happy that that running wasn't going to interfere with the realtime stuff. We did this using Nerves which is a Linux platform set up to boot the BEAM and nothing else (e.g. no init system, just a special pid 0 binary that boots the BEAM and lets that handle all other processes). It had some plus points like making firmware upgrade trivial and simplifying the system, but not being a "normal" linux platform was a bit irritating sometimes. You could equally well just run Elixir as an application normally.