Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly - Comments

Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly

nasretdinov

Tinygo made a lot of progress over the years -- e.g. they've recently introduced macOS support!

It does indeed produce much smaller binaries, including for macOS.

  yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time tinygo build -o test-tiny main.go


________________________________________________________
Executed in 1.06 secs fish external usr time 1.18 secs 0.31 millis 1.18 secs sys time 0.18 secs 1.50 millis 0.18 secs yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time go build -o test-normal main.go ________________________________________________________ Executed in 75.79 millis fish external usr time 64.06 millis 0.41 millis 63.64 millis sys time 96.76 millis 1.75 millis 95.01 millis yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> ll total 5096 -rw-r--r--@ 1 yuriy staff 74B 3 Apr 19:17 main.go -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy staff 2.3M 3 Apr 19:18 test-normal* -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy staff 192K 3 Apr 19:18 test-tiny* yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> cat main.go package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Printf("Hello world!\n") }
tatjam

Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?

nasretdinov

You can disable GC in tinygo, so if you allocate all the necessary buffers beforehand it can have good performance with real-time characteristics. If you _need_ dynamic memory allocation then no, because you need GC it can't provide realtime guarantees.

carverauto

We're streaming RSTP camera feeds through WASM plugins and host-bridge adapters, no problem. I was surprised how well it worked TBH.

https://code.carverauto.dev/carverauto/serviceradar/src/bran...

clktmr

I've written a fair amount of code for EmbeddedGo. Garbage Collector is not an issue if you avoid heap allocations in your main loop. But if you're CPU bound a goroutine might block others from running for quite some time. If your platform supports async preemption, you might be able to patch the goroutine scheduler with realtime capabilities.

randusername

Can you elaborate on this and how it would be different from signaling on interrupts and DMA?

Hardware-level async makes sense to me. I can scope it. I can read the data sheet.

Software async in contrast seems difficult to characterize and reason about so I've been intimidated.

carverauto

We're using TinyGo and the Wazero runtime for our WASM plugin system in ServiceRadar, highly recommend both if you're using golang.

evacchi

Yay wazero maintainer here, thanks for the shout-out!

apitman

Wazero is awesome. For anyone wanting to embed in languages other than Go, check out Extism.

mi_lk

What are the tradeoffs compared to standard Go?

jrockway

It gets better every release, but there are missing language features:

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/

And parts of the stdlib that don't work:

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/

pancsta

TinyGo doesnt have networking in WASI[0] and the WASM websocket module[1] was last updated 5 years ago. Go without stdlib is not Go.

[0] https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/issues/4880

[1] https://github.com/Nerzal/tinywebsocket

jackhalford

Could we compile tailscale with tinygo to run it on openwrt? Last time I checked tailscale was too large for 8MB flash routers

nasretdinov

Tinygo made a lot of progress over the years -- e.g. they've recently introduced macOS support!

It does indeed produce much smaller binaries, including for macOS.

  yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time tinygo build -o test-tiny main.go


________________________________________________________
Executed in 1.06 secs fish external usr time 1.18 secs 0.31 millis 1.18 secs sys time 0.18 secs 1.50 millis 0.18 secs yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time go build -o test-normal main.go ________________________________________________________ Executed in 75.79 millis fish external usr time 64.06 millis 0.41 millis 63.64 millis sys time 96.76 millis 1.75 millis 95.01 millis yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> ll total 5096 -rw-r--r--@ 1 yuriy staff 74B 3 Apr 19:17 main.go -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy staff 2.3M 3 Apr 19:18 test-normal* -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy staff 192K 3 Apr 19:18 test-tiny* yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> cat main.go package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Printf("Hello world!\n") }
tatjam

Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?

nasretdinov

You can disable GC in tinygo, so if you allocate all the necessary buffers beforehand it can have good performance with real-time characteristics. If you _need_ dynamic memory allocation then no, because you need GC it can't provide realtime guarantees.

carverauto

We're streaming RSTP camera feeds through WASM plugins and host-bridge adapters, no problem. I was surprised how well it worked TBH.

https://code.carverauto.dev/carverauto/serviceradar/src/bran...

clktmr

I've written a fair amount of code for EmbeddedGo. Garbage Collector is not an issue if you avoid heap allocations in your main loop. But if you're CPU bound a goroutine might block others from running for quite some time. If your platform supports async preemption, you might be able to patch the goroutine scheduler with realtime capabilities.

randusername

Can you elaborate on this and how it would be different from signaling on interrupts and DMA?

Hardware-level async makes sense to me. I can scope it. I can read the data sheet.

Software async in contrast seems difficult to characterize and reason about so I've been intimidated.

carverauto

We're using TinyGo and the Wazero runtime for our WASM plugin system in ServiceRadar, highly recommend both if you're using golang.

evacchi

Yay wazero maintainer here, thanks for the shout-out!

apitman

Wazero is awesome. For anyone wanting to embed in languages other than Go, check out Extism.

mi_lk

What are the tradeoffs compared to standard Go?

jrockway

It gets better every release, but there are missing language features:

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/

And parts of the stdlib that don't work:

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/

pancsta

TinyGo doesnt have networking in WASI[0] and the WASM websocket module[1] was last updated 5 years ago. Go without stdlib is not Go.

[0] https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/issues/4880

[1] https://github.com/Nerzal/tinywebsocket

jackhalford

Could we compile tailscale with tinygo to run it on openwrt? Last time I checked tailscale was too large for 8MB flash routers