G.E.R.T : a go-based toolkit for embedded applications

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complicated due to the emergence of SOCs (system-on-a-chip) with multiple cores, dizzying amounts of peripherals, and complicated virtual memory systems. Unfortunately, performant embedded systems for SOCs are still largely written in either bare-metal C or userspace C because high-level languages running in userspace can have too much latency. This thesis proposes a new system called G.E.R.T, the Golang Embedded Run-Time, for multi-core ARM processors. GERT is a modified version of the Go runtime for bare-metal operation on multi-core ARMv7a SOC's. It is used to evaluate the effectiveness of using a high-level, type-safe, and garbage collected language for embedded applications. G.E.R.T provides the multiprocessor support and basic memory abstractions of a typical embedded toolkit while also enabling the user to leverage the language features of Go in order to develop concurrent embedded programs that are easier to reason about than similar ones written in C.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Coroneos, Yanni (Yanni E.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Frans Kaashoek.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112838

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/112838