The Go language for embedded systems

As one of the things I do is evaluate new technologies for embedded systems, the Go language from Google is an interesting development.  I have been looking for a better “system” language for some time.  What I mean by a better system language is one that is nearly as efficient as C, does not require a large runtime, has a fast start-up time, and yet supports modern language features.  It is interesting that the constraints for very high performance server applications are often similar to those found in embedded systems in that applications must make very efficient use of memory and CPU cycles.  This is why C++ is still used a lot by Google and is also popular in embedded systems, but is not as common in applications where CPU power is plentiful compared to the resources to implement the application such as business applications.  One area of divergence is the focus on multi-core for high end server applications, but in the next few years, multi-core CPU’s such as the Atom and ARM Cortex-A9 will likely be common in low power embedded systems.

There are other options.  Vala is very nice to use, is efficient, offers advanced language features, and extensive language bindings.  Vala is being used to implement some of the http://freesmartphone.org software stack.  C/C++ are the old standby languages, but are rather tedious to program in compared to some of the newer languages in that source and header files are separate, and memory management is manual.

My interest in Go at this time is for ARM systems, so I ran a few experiments.  From what I can tell, there does exist an ARM Go compiler that is able to produce ARM code, but it currently lacks support for EABI soft floating point.  The lack of floating point support is pretty much a show stopper for now, but it is at least a start.  The following is an example:

export GOARCH=arm
cd $GOROOT/src/
./make-arm.bash

cd
(create the following source file: hello.go)

==================
package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
        fmt.Printf("Hello, world\n");
}
=================

5g hello.go   (5g is the ARM compiler)
5l hello.5
scp 5.out root@n900:  (copy to ARM system)
ssh root@n900
?:~# ./5.out
Hello, world

(modify with floating point code)

==================
package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
        var f = 1.5;
        fmt.Printf("Hello, world\n");
        fmt.Printf("float f = %f\n", f);
}

=================

(now run on ARM system)
?:~# ./5.out
Segmentation fault

As, you can see, floating point does not work as expected.  I’m not sure yet if gogcc can be configured to compile ARM binaries.  The other area where Go appears to need a lot of work is bindings to various libraries.  Though it does not appear to be ready for embedded ARM systems at this time, Go will be an interesting language to watch over the next few years.