Microcontroller and sensors support

[FedericoCeratto]

A project to support microcontroller could provide:

• nim.cfg and panicoverride.nim files for various microcontrollers and SBCs: AVR (e.g. ATmega), ARM (e.g. STM32), etc
• macros and templates to access GPIO and more on popular boards
• libraries to use popular sensors and other devices
• integration tests to ensure the Nim compiler and parts of the stdlib work on micros
• tutorials and tools

Related to #81

[Yardanico]

"integration tests to ensure the Nim compiler / stdlib works on micros" most part of Nim stdlib relies on a GC to work

[FedericoCeratto]

@Yardanico true, yet some modules do not. Description updated. Also some newer memory management methods should work with more modules.

[cfvescovo]

We should implement some built-in Arduino functions (e.g. analogRead) to make it easier to use the library for beginners.

[cfvescovo]

We should provide some sort of extension for popular editors too.

[cfvescovo]

There is a lot of work to do here....

[ponyatov]

Maybe some effort should be done for extending the language with minimalistic coroutines and (async) message passing with very limited message sized especially for low-end microcontrollers (STM32L0 like).

This method can let to write rigid embedded software without using full-size RTOS (few size-limited queues corresponds to the required priority number). I feel some advantages here: https://www.state-machine.com/

And this message-passing programming can lead the Nim language to programming for multiple computing nodes in a cluster or computing grids, where we still have no good tools to write programs easily.

[nickdex]

Would tinygo provide some inspiration for GC issue?

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 we want to keep the Go memory model (which implies garbage collection of some sort).

[Araq]

We already have --newruntime as a superior, GC-free solution.