Peter Munch-Ellingsen: Why I wrote my own keyboard firmware in Nim (NimConf 2021)

What people said

pure_simplicity · 2021-11 · Recommendation

Well, you give yourself a whole lot of extra work by attempting to create a Python to C transpiler, basically creating an even less mature and less popular language ecosystem than Nim has, when you could use Nim and get most of the benefits (statically typed, compiled to C) out of the box and enjoy their growing ecosystem. It seems that Prometeo is currently more limited than Nim. Maybe I'm not understanding your use case well enough and maybe your approach is actually a locally optimal solution, and I honestly greatly respect your effort and want to see your project succeed, cuz I love Python too. I even wanted to make a faster python myself at some point. Just, the more I learn about Nim, the more I appreciate its design decisions and think to myself: this is the faster version of python I'm looking for. Now, we just need the large package ecosystem that python has, but I'm willing to both wait and participate in making it come about. This presentation about writing keyboard firmware in Nim may be helpful, if you're willing to give Nim some more consideration: [VIDEO] There is also another talk about embedded programming in Nim from the same conference, here: [LINK]

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archargelod · 2024-10 · Reference

I don't have any first-hand experience with embedded myself, but I've seen positive comments on different forums about using Nim in production for embedded devices. For example, see a couple pages of comments by girvo [1]. Also there's a video on writing keyboard driver in Nim [2]. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]

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PMunch · 2021-10 · Reference

Oh it definitely can run on those devices! I wrote my own keyboard firmware from scratch in Nim, and the firmware sizes are vanishingly small compared to even simple "hello world" level stuff in Arduino. I did a talk on it for NimConf2021: [VIDEO]

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