Instead of specifying explicit commands, most of these commands have
been replaced by more specific properties.
This is work that will be necessary for an eventual -programmer flag to
the compiler, with which it is possible to select which programmer to
use to flash or debug a chip. That's not very useful for boards that
already include a programmer or bootloader for that purpose, but is very
useful for novel boards or single-purpose boards that are not already
included in TinyGo.
This avoids a ton of duplication and makes it easier to change a generic
target (for example, the "cortex-m" target) for all boards that use it.
Also, by making it possible to inherit properties from a parent target
specification, it is easier to support out-of-tree boards that don't
have to be updated so often. A target specification for a
special-purpose board can simply inherit the specification of a
supported chip and override the properites it needs to override (like
the programming interface).
Let the standard library think that it is compiling for js/wasm.
The most correct way of supporting bare metal Cortex-M targets would be
using the 'arm' build tag and specifying no OS or an 'undefined' OS
(perhaps GOOS=noos?). However, there is no build tag for specifying no
OS at all, the closest possible is GOOS=js which makes very few
assumptions.
Sadly GOOS=js also makes some assumptions: it assumes to be running with
GOARCH=wasm. This would not be such a problem, just add js, wasm and arm
as build tags. However, having two GOARCH build tags leads to an error
in internal/cpu: it defines variables for both architectures which then
conflict.
To work around these problems, the 'arm' target has been renamed to
'tinygo.arm', which should work around these problems. In the future, a
GOOS=noos (or similar) should be added which can work with any
architecture and doesn't implement OS-specific stuff.
This is kind of dirty with that huge list of linker params, but it works
and it produces smaller object files (probably because GCC is better
optimized for size).
Ayke van Laethem