This can be very useful for some purposes:
* It makes it possible to disable the UART in cases where it is not
needed or needs to be disabled to conserve power.
* It makes it possible to disable the serial output to reduce code
size, which may be important for some chips. Sometimes, a few kB can
be saved this way.
* It makes it possible to override the default, for example you might
want to use an actual UART to debug the USB-CDC implementation.
It also lowers the dependency on having machine.Serial defined, which is
often not defined when targeting a chip. Eventually, we might want to
make it possible to write `-target=nrf52` or `-target=atmega328p` for
example to target the chip itself with no board specific assumptions.
The defaults don't change. I checked this by running `make smoketest`
before and after and comparing the results.
It was `avr-atmel-none`, which is incorrect. It must be
`avr-unknown-unknown`.
Additionally, there is no reason to specify the target triple per chip,
it can be done for all AVR chips at once as it doesn't vary like
Cortex-M chips.
Somehow I forgot to add this emulator. With this, you can easily emulate
programs:
$ tinygo run -target=atmega1284p examples/serial
Loaded 698 .text at address 0x0
Loaded 12 .data
hello world!..
hello world!..
hello world!..
Not tested on actual hardware, only on simavr. The main motivation for
adding this chip is to be able to run simulated tests using a much
larger memory space (16kB RAM, 128kB flash) without jumping to the XMega
devices that may not be as well supported by LLVM.
