Interesting you use Nim, would you have some resources/pointers for using Nim on embedded devices.
Do you use a native compiler or cross-compile it for this (RISC-V) chip ?
With #line macros injected into the compiled C output source files, JTAG debugging and other tools just work, which is quite nice.
That said, if I was on the C3 or any of the RISC-V chips I’d look at using the C toolchain directly: you can easily have “nim c main.nim” call out to a specific C compiler with your specific build and linker flags!
The one annoyance in all of the embedded toolkits when trying to use non-C/C++ languages is always CMake; companies build component systems and such on top of it which a naive C compiler usage can’t really leverage, which means you end up rebuilding the whole build toolchain again.
Easier to just stick within CMake and use Nim’s C output instead, at least for now (until I get some time to write a nimscript parser for a subset of ESP-IDF’s CMake file format…)
I also use Nim quite a bit on linux/windows for machine-learning purposes. But even on these systems, It is generally a pain to try to trick Nim into using a compiler not directly supported, as some original hard-coded flags would be incompatible with the one i am trying to use,for example NVCC .
Follow up question, Do you generally use Nim on ESP like chips which run some form of a RTOS, or also on bare-metal micro-controllers ?
To answer your follow up question; both - we’re in the process of bringing up firmware for the STM32G0 and L4 microcontrollers, and CubeMX is such a pain to try and bind as-is, we started to play with svd2nim and see if we can’t bring up peripherals that way instead. That’s a less well tread path of course, but it’s promising so far. Only downside is that’s more like Rust’s approach of rebuilding the world, but oh well
Thanks again for taking time for a detailed reply!!