I always enjoy stories about Ada, Pascal, Object Pascal, Prolog, Perl, OCaml, Standard ML, Forth, Pike, Fortran, Scheme, Common Lisp, or some APL derivative in use in the wild.
It’s especially good to see a story about a recent project on a smaller system using Ada.
At a lower level in the formal verification stack than this, it's on the one hand awesome that ARM has published a machine readable architecture specification for the more recent A architectures in ASL... and on the other hand extremely frustrating that they haven't done the same for M.
"For example, the ASL code published through the A-Profile Arm Architecture Reference Manual, Exploration Tools downloads for A-Profile, or the Armv8-M Architecture Reference Manual."
Cortex-M is a lovely platform. Shame it has stagnated. Both STM32H7 (or N6) or NXP RT1170/80 beg for a major update - more performance, inclusion of NEON (or equivalent), support for DDR3 at least, PCIe?
It would be amazing for doing some more complex DSP.
Otherwise using those platforms is a bit like programming on 8086 today. Fun. You get basic stuff done and then you hit a wall. Only option is to jump on SoM stuff or FPGA which is another can of worms in itself.
ST seems to consistently put out faster chips [1]. I think the better question is why bother though? The real reason to use a Cortex-M is determinism in hard real-time systems. I'm sure DDR3 and PCIe would be cool in an MCU and people would certainly make some interesting things with it, but at that point you either aren't making a hard real-time system and would benefit greatly from an MPU, allowing you to run Linux and benefit from the wealth of drivers available for these interfaces, or your real-time deadlines are so tight an FPGA would be a better choice. The real advantage of the Cortex-Ms is that they can be manufactured on ancient process nodes for next to nothing. The moment you don't care about that, why not upgrade to an i.MX8?
I always enjoy stories about Ada, Pascal, Object Pascal, Prolog, Perl, OCaml, Standard ML, Forth, Pike, Fortran, Scheme, Common Lisp, or some APL derivative in use in the wild.
It’s especially good to see a story about a recent project on a smaller system using Ada.
At a lower level in the formal verification stack than this, it's on the one hand awesome that ARM has published a machine readable architecture specification for the more recent A architectures in ASL... and on the other hand extremely frustrating that they haven't done the same for M.
Looks as though ARM is doing ASL for Armv8-M.
"For example, the ASL code published through the A-Profile Arm Architecture Reference Manual, Exploration Tools downloads for A-Profile, or the Armv8-M Architecture Reference Manual."
https://developer.arm.com/architectures/architecture%20speci...
I'll read more later but just keep in mind nucleo is a series of form factors. There's even M33 on a -144 which is ARMv8-M
Cortex-M is a lovely platform. Shame it has stagnated. Both STM32H7 (or N6) or NXP RT1170/80 beg for a major update - more performance, inclusion of NEON (or equivalent), support for DDR3 at least, PCIe?
It would be amazing for doing some more complex DSP.
Otherwise using those platforms is a bit like programming on 8086 today. Fun. You get basic stuff done and then you hit a wall. Only option is to jump on SoM stuff or FPGA which is another can of worms in itself.
ST seems to consistently put out faster chips [1]. I think the better question is why bother though? The real reason to use a Cortex-M is determinism in hard real-time systems. I'm sure DDR3 and PCIe would be cool in an MCU and people would certainly make some interesting things with it, but at that point you either aren't making a hard real-time system and would benefit greatly from an MPU, allowing you to run Linux and benefit from the wealth of drivers available for these interfaces, or your real-time deadlines are so tight an FPGA would be a better choice. The real advantage of the Cortex-Ms is that they can be manufactured on ancient process nodes for next to nothing. The moment you don't care about that, why not upgrade to an i.MX8?
[1] https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/campaigns/stm32v8-high-...