Re: life extension of old computers thanks to opensource Contiki

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Mark McDougall wrote:

> Most processors are going to benefit from a bit of hand-coded assembly in an
> ISR, so your point is moot.

Not at all. ARM is particularly challenged w.r.t interrupt latency, so
it requires careful tweaking. It is also possibly the most broadly used
32-bit core, by which I mean it is found in big devices that are
microprocessors, and small devices that are microcontrollers with no
external memory bus and say 32K of internal flash/2K internal RAM.

These tiny ARM devices are being positioned to replace 8-bit devices in
a large number of low-level control applications, many of which are not
coded in C.

Learning to code in ARM assembler is by no means a useless skill, as it
is directly applicable to modern-day engineering tasks.

AVR is a RISC architecture too, albeit an 8-bit one. Ditto MSP430
(16-bit RISC). Nobody would suggest that it is silly to learn these
assembly languages.