[HN Gopher] Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly
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Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly
Author : uticus
Score : 110 points
Date : 2026-04-03 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tinygo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tinygo.org)
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Tinygo made a lot of progress over the years -- e.g. they've
| recently introduced macOS support!
|
| It does indeed produce much smaller binaries, including for
| macOS. yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time tinygo
| build -o test-tiny main.go
| ________________________________________________________
| Executed in 1.06 secs fish external usr
| time 1.18 secs 0.31 millis 1.18 secs sys time
| 0.18 secs 1.50 millis 0.18 secs
| yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time go build -o test-normal main.go
| ________________________________________________________
| Executed in 75.79 millis fish external
| usr time 64.06 millis 0.41 millis 63.64 millis
| sys time 96.76 millis 1.75 millis 95.01 millis
| yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> ll total 5096 -rw-r--
| r--@ 1 yuriy staff 74B 3 Apr 19:17 main.go -rwxr-xr-x@
| 1 yuriy staff 2.3M 3 Apr 19:18 test-normal* -rwxr-xr-x@
| 1 yuriy staff 192K 3 Apr 19:18 test-tiny*
| yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> cat main.go package main
| import "fmt" func main() {
| fmt.Printf("Hello world!\n") }
| tatjam wrote:
| Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is
| wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this
| is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro
| controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?
| nasretdinov wrote:
| You can disable GC in tinygo, so if you allocate all the
| necessary buffers beforehand it can have good performance with
| real-time characteristics. If you _need_ dynamic memory
| allocation then no, because you need GC it can't provide
| realtime guarantees.
| Groxx wrote:
| Doesn't seem like those should be mutually exclusive, though
| the habits involved are quite opposing and I can definitely
| believe they're _uncommon_.
|
| E.g. GC doesn't need to be precise. You could reserve CPU
| budget for GC, and only use that much at a time before
| yielding control. As long as you still free enough to not
| OOM, you're fine.
| carverauto wrote:
| We're streaming RSTP camera feeds through WASM plugins and
| host-bridge adapters, no problem. I was surprised how well it
| worked TBH.
|
| https://code.carverauto.dev/carverauto/serviceradar/src/bran...
| clktmr wrote:
| I've written a fair amount of code for EmbeddedGo. Garbage
| Collector is not an issue if you avoid heap allocations in your
| main loop. But if you're CPU bound a goroutine might block
| others from running for quite some time. If your platform
| supports async preemption, you might be able to patch the
| goroutine scheduler with realtime capabilities.
| randusername wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this and how it would be different from
| signaling on interrupts and DMA?
|
| Hardware-level async makes sense to me. I can scope it. I can
| read the data sheet.
|
| Software async in contrast seems difficult to characterize and
| reason about so I've been intimidated.
| carverauto wrote:
| We're using TinyGo and the Wazero runtime for our WASM plugin
| system in ServiceRadar, highly recommend both if you're using
| golang.
| evacchi wrote:
| Yay wazero maintainer here, thanks for the shout-out!
| pancsta wrote:
| It was good to meet at wasm.io!
| apitman wrote:
| Wazero is awesome. For anyone wanting to embed in languages
| other than Go, check out Extism.
| mi_lk wrote:
| What are the tradeoffs compared to standard Go?
| jrockway wrote:
| It gets better every release, but there are missing language
| features:
|
| https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/
|
| And parts of the stdlib that don't work:
|
| https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/
| pancsta wrote:
| TinyGo doesnt have networking in WASI[0] and the WASM websocket
| module[1] was last updated 5 years ago. Go without stdlib is not
| Go.
|
| [0] https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/issues/4880
|
| [1] https://github.com/Nerzal/tinywebsocket
| jackhalford wrote:
| Could we compile tailscale with tinygo to run it on openwrt? Last
| time I checked tailscale was too large for 8MB flash routers
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(page generated 2026-04-03 23:00 UTC)