I just noticed people are planning to add support for 8-bit AVR in Rust: [image] Adding 16-bit pointer support Apparently LLVM does have a 16-bit x86 backend. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an emulator that can run such code. This might be a viable path for testing 16-bit support i…

This would be possible but a lot of work. There are many places where it’s assumed that the only possible word sizes are 32 and 64 bit. That said, it would mostly be tedious work tracking down those places and generalizing them. Unlikely to happen, however, unless someone who really wants it does th…

The CI issue could be “solved” with a software emulator. However, I’m less convinced that this will be just a (rather involved) find-and-replace, because even if you could technically execute some Julia code on an MCU, what happens when you need to JIT compile something type-unstable, or make a syst…

[image] jpsamaroo: The CI issue could be “solved” with a software emulator. Do you know how long the Julia test suite takes to run on non-emulated hardware? Of course, this could run only daily instead of on each PR, so yes, I suppose that’s possible. Re MCUs: I wasn’t really addressing MCUs…

Hence solved in quotes :slight_smile: And I doubt even daily tests would be wise; it would likely take days to complete on (emulated) 16/8-bit MCU hardware. I’m focusing on the MCU aspect because: There have been a number of other Discourse posts asking almost exactly the same thing recently I do…

I know absolutely nothing about MCUs so I’ll leave that up to you :smile:

[image] jpsamaroo: I don’t know of any hardware in common usage today that’s less than 32-bit, other than MCUs I don’t think this post is about seriously considering porting Julia to anything concrete; it looks more like an idle question.

In that case, in favor of keeping down the noise from duplicate posts, can we lock further threads like these (about Julia and MCUs) unless people actually put forward plans/PRs/packages to accomplish this goal? A simple search for MCU or microcontroller would likely turn up those previous posts and…

For reference: [image] Julia for microcontrollers (like Micropython) Internals & Design Dear Julia community members, I wish to develop a fork of Julia that can run on low memory low ram microcontrollers . Similar to Micropython (python for microcontrollers) Micropyth…

It might be possible to write a julia → nim / chapel transpiler, which then could compile to C/C++, and then you would give it to the arduino IDE to compile for the MCU. Errors would be a bit of a headache though, and the 8-bit environment is usually very constrained, ie 2K ram and 16/32K of program…

[image] y4lu: It might be possible to write a julia -> nim / chapel transpiler, which then could compile to C/C++ I’m not saying a transpiler to Nim or Chapel wouldn’t be interesting (for non-16-bit, non-MCU reasons), but why not straight to C (or possibly machine code/assembly with PackageCo…

FYI: 16-bit support in LLVM; any idea if easy to support it/8-bit micros/MCUs in Julia?

Internals & Design

jpsamaroo December 7, 2018, 9:47pm 9

For reference:

Topic		Replies	Views
Julia for microcontrollers (like Micropython) Internals & Design proposal	25	8555	January 17, 2026
How to start programing microcontroller in Julia ? is any package? General Usage hardware , arduino	17	9351	December 11, 2018
Now that Julia w/o LLVM is a thing, how long before I can run Julia on RPi Pico? General Usage	11	2081	September 28, 2022
Bring Julia code to embedded hardware (ARM) Maker	92	22633	June 14, 2023
Julia 1.12 new --trim feature for MCU compiler General Usage	7	544	October 10, 2025

FYI: 16-bit support in LLVM; any idea if easy to support it/8-bit micros/MCUs in Julia?

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