Reply to post: Re: Far to late

Re: Far to late

Here’s a list of the JTAG debuggers I can buy for next-day delivery. Point to the one that supports RISCV please.

https://uk.farnell.com/c/development-boards-evaluation-tools/debuggers-emulators-jtag-tools-accessories/debuggers-emulators-jtag-tools

I’m sure One Exists, but here’s a scenario - I’m a contractor, and my washing machine development out in Bangalore is stalled on the production line, some software problem. No prob, I’ll just ring them up and get them to stick a JTAG debugger on it. Oh, *they haven’t got one?!* WTAF. And it takes six weeks to get the Special One through Indian customs?! Yes, I know somebody should have thought of that, but they didn’t, did they. It’s the exact equivalent of why you never, ever, specify an unusual screw that needs the special screwdriver. [hint: not an invented scenario].

Gcc/LLVM. “can be leveraged”.

By *whom* on *which budget*?!

E.g. who is supporting FORTRAN on RISCV, or COBOL, or HiPE for Erlang?

Of course, it could be done. But it isn’t. There are literally hundreds of things like this that just don’t work out of the box. Many of them may be minority sports. But no *company* is going to buy a computer where you have to ask whether $SpecialThing is supported. We’ve had x86 working across the ecosystem for so long, we don’t realise just how much work it took.

ARM have spent the last decade catching up to that level of support, siphoning a river of cash from a profitable business to do so. What pot of money is RISCV using to re-do that?

You’ve completely misunderstood “Intel use LLVM now”. No. They don’t. They have contributed millions of developer-hours of effort to LLVM, such that LLVM now produces great results on Intel architecture. There are no optimisation fairies.

Secondly, you are arguing what is always argued, that RISCV can sit in the space of not-demanding applications, like MCUs etc. But then, there are literally *dozens* of CPUs in that space, all of which are actually a great fit for what they do. What exactly is wrong with an ATMEGA808, which has sold literally billions, costs cents, and does what it needs to do? Or one of the many Texas Instruments devices, or Analog Devices?

Given that I have the tool chain for all of these installed on my computer, and it worked on my previous project, and I have a skeleton for a functional application already working, because the new embedded project is 90% like the old one, and I have a parts bin of thousands of ADI devices that I would like to use up, and a working dev board on my desk, and they only cost 5p each. What possible incentive are you going to offer me to change horses?! Makes no sense at all.

There’s plenty of room in the embedded space, and it’s all *filled* with good solutions. The only people punting RISCV for this, are hobbyists who only know the big three (by comparison) big-iron CPUs.