There’s a few of us working in this area, well rather Nim on embedded microcontrollers. :-)
It works fantastically, though most of us aren’t traditional hard real time folks. Nevertheless Nim’s new ARC is excellent for this area. The overhead of the GC basically is just an increment/decrement on an integer (no atomic). That means it’s fast and predictable for modern MCUs and plays well with C code. If you want a tight interrupt function you can stick an object in global variable and know it won’t incur GC overhead.
It’s relatively easy to reason about where and when you want memory to be free’ed (actually easier than Rust). Also allocator pools are easy to utilize.
On a side note, as the Nim compiler improves moves and sinks analysis, the runtime overhead of ARC approaches that of Rust’s compile time memory management, especially with a lot of Rust code that use lots of Rc wrappers.
P.S. I’m planning to write a Nim wrapper for Zephyr RTOS when I get time later in the summer, and improve the existing FreeRTOS support too.
