TinyGo - Go compiler for microcontrollers

We never expected Go to be an embedded language and so it's got serious problems [...].

-- Rob Pike, GopherCon 2014 Opening Keynote

TinyGo is a project to bring Go to microcontrollers and small systems with a single processor core. It is similar to emgo but a major difference is that I want to keep the Go memory model (which implies garbage collection of some sort). Another difference is that TinyGo uses LLVM internally instead of emitting C, which hopefully leads to smaller and more efficient code and certainly leads to more flexibility.

My original reasoning was: if Python can run on microcontrollers, then certainly Go should be able to and run on even lower level micros.

Example program (blinky):

import (
	"machine"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	led := machine.GPIO{machine.LED}
	led.Configure(machine.GPIOConfig{Mode: machine.GPIO_OUTPUT})
	for {
		led.Low()
		time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 1000)

		led.High()
		time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 1000)
	}
}

Currently supported features:

control flow
many (but not all) basic types: most ints, floats, strings, structs
function calling
interfaces for basic types (with type switches and asserts)
goroutines (very initial support)
function pointers (non-blocking)
interface methods
standard library (but most packages won't work due to missing language features)
slices (partially)
maps (very rough, unfinished)
defer
closures
bound methods

Not yet supported:

complex numbers
garbage collection
recover
channels
introspection (if it ever gets implemented)
...

Supported targets

The following architectures/systems are currently supported:

ARM (Cortex-M)
AVR (Arduino Uno)
Linux

For more information, see this list of targets and boards. Pull requests for broader support are welcome!

Analysis and optimizations

The goal is to reduce code size (and increase performance) by performing all kinds of whole-program analysis passes. The official Go compiler doesn't do a whole lot of analysis (except for escape analysis) becauses it needs to be fast, but embedded programs are necessarily smaller so it becomes practical. And I think especially program size can be reduced by a large margin when actually trying to optimize for it.

Implemented compiler passes:

Analyse which functions are blocking. Blocking functions are functions that call sleep, chan send, etc. Its parents are also blocking.
Analyse whether the scheduler is needed. It is only needed when there are go statements for blocking functions.
Analyse whether a given type switch or type assert is possible with type-based alias analysis. I would like to use flow-based alias analysis in the future, if feasible.
Do basic dead code elimination of functions. This pass makes later passes better and probably improves compile time as well.

Building

See the installation instructions.

Documentation

Documentation is currently maintained on a dedicated ReadTheDocs page.

License

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, just like the Go project itself.

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