[swift-dev] Feasibility of Swift for Arduino

[Matthijs Hollemans]

Hi all,

Just out of curiosity, how feasible would it be to get swiftc working as a cross-compiler for Arduino microcontrollers?

Currently the Arduino is programmed in C/C++ and seeing as Swift is positioned as a replacement for those languages, I’m wondering if it could live up to this task already.

Obviously, the low-end Arduinos use an 8-bit CPU and an LLVM code generator for this CPU is required. But my main concern is the requirements of the Swift runtime. An Arduino Uno only has 32 kB of working memory. How much of that would be taken up by the Swift runtime?

Any insights would be appreciated!

-Matthijs