Welcome to the 12th issue of TMPDIR Weekly, a newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Please pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested and send any tips or feedback to our forum or news@tmpdir.org.
Linux
Rust 1.56 was released. The important piece is that it stabilizes the 2021 Edition as its mechanism to define opt-in changes which may be backward incompatible. Last was 2018 edition. This release also uses the LLVM 13 release, which is also default compiler in Yoe distro as well.
At the Linley conference SiFive announced the fastest RISCV core, which is rubbing shoulders with the Arm Cortex-A78. This comes on top of the current P550 core. This is quite exciting for a new ISA and CPU architecture to showcase these kinds of numbers.
IoT
Thinking on SIOT data types is continuing in
ADR-1. The good news is we
are learning how to simplify things, yet provide ways to represent more complex
data in SIOT Points, such as arrays and maps. I think there are inherent
advantages in simple/flexible data structures for storage and wire formats --
especially for distributed systems in that core layers can remain the same as
you add new features to the system. -- cb
Other
Espressif is now using RISC-V in their ESP32 WiFi/Bluetooth MCUs.
This podcast is an interesting listen. In it the author of Lamdera discusses his solutions to some of the fundamental problems of Web applications and architecture -- might be interesting to anyone interested in computer/web architecture in general. See more notes here. Mario made a comment that really resonated with me:
when you actually use it (Elm) and feel the ergonomics, its not just the fact that Elm has that type safety, it’s instant, it’s fast, one of the banes of having to build a platform is you never get to use the platform, I feel 90% of my time is writing Haskell in the Elm compiler – that’s where most of Lamdera’s stuff is – it’s Haskell. And, it’s not nice – I love Haskell – it has so many cool things and was my gateway drug into FP, but man – waiting 30-40 seconds just to type things is like – yeah – it’s so understated how Evan’s focus on making that performance and that speed fast – it just changes – fast type inference and slow type inference may as well be two completely different things in my eyes. The way that you build things and the way you approach stuff when you have it be that quick is completely different, and the way I approach full stack apps with Lamdera is just completely different – the confidence you have to charge into wide sweeping changes …
I feel the same way. Programming in Elm and Go is a much more than just the language paradigm – both compilers are fast and efficient – the tooling is excellent. It is a completely different experience. -- cb
We did a little looking into the Julia programming language. Julia is a high performance dynamically typed language that compiles to efficient native code using LLVM. It is a general purpose language, but is typically used for numerical analysis and computational science. Its performance sets it appart from other languages in this space like Python and R. Additionally, its package system is very advanced and allows you to easily compose solutions. If you like Jupyter notesbooks, give the Pluto package a try.
Quote for the week
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.
John Gall, Systemantics (1975)
Join our Discourse forum to discuss these or new topics. Listen to previous podcasts at https://tmpdir.org/.
Thanks for reading!
Khem and Cliff