Embedded Swift

I’m excited for this prospective vision for Embedded Swift.

I have been working on a commercial product using @carlos42421's tool chain that relies on swift working on very small microcontrollers. Cost is important and limiting to only the largest microcontrollers, or on the more extreme end ROTS systems, completely eliminates huge categories of products and systems that can benefit from Swift.

I’m a little disappointed that there has been so much radio silence since the Call for interest by Ted Kremenek. I hope that with this vision document we can start a small workgroup or collaboration where we can bring in all of the great work that has been done by so many such as @andyliu and @carlos42421 among countless others to make sure that Swift can be used on the smallest of systems up to the largest servers and powerful handheld devices.

As a point of perspective, I personally helped someone get a simple blink program for an ATtiny that compiled to 372 bytes, or about 24 times smaller than the best achieved by this proposal. It is possible, I can’t say how excited I am to have people internal to Apple working on this but fear that without the community involvement promised over a year ago and touted on Swift.org we could cut off a large portion of the use case.

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