Hello,

On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 08:29:14 -0500
Kumar Gala <kumar.gala@linaro.org> wrote:

On Aug 25, 2019, at 2:18 AM, Paul Sokolovsky
<paul.sokolovsky@linaro.org> wrote:

Hello,

We have a patch to enable format specifiers %lld, %llu (i.e. dealing
with "long long" C types) for Newlib libc in the next Zephyr SDK
release: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/pull/101

[]

There are some other options, but they require more development
effort.

1. Add support for newlib nano for long long.
2. Add support to crosstool-ng to build multiple newlib variants.
And build 2 variants similar to what the ARM embedded toolchains do
today (one nano, one full).

Right, those are useful options to keep in mind and explore. But given
that they require more development effort, IMHO they should be treated
as separate tasks/projects with their own stakeholders.

And perhaps the problem space considered thoroughly first. As an
example, not everyone knows that there're two "nano" Newlib's. The
latest contender is https://keithp.com/newlib-nano/ . It would be easy
to discount it as something from someone who's not even aware that
"nano" is already taken, but that's @keithp of X.org, etc, fame. So,
either he indeed doesn't known that Newlib already has "nano" mode,
or he thinks that the old nano is not nano enough.

The result is a library that offers broad API support, including
things like complex numbers, high quality math functions that support
both float and double values, a complete string library with wide
char support but with a stdio API that takes only a 20 bytes of RAM.

And that's only the beginning. I personally have an impression that I
see a new libc popping up in github like every month. Hardly they would
be useful for our usecase, but I guess someone wanting to invest time
in developing and maintaining a particular solution would want to check
them out first nonetheless.

And all that is a nice rabbit hole to follow, but from project
management/"enterprise-grade" software engineering perspective, seems
to be quite distinct from an issue at hand of enabling a missing
feature in already selected component, especially that the feature
starts to look like security-related
(https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/pull/101#issuecomment-525300825)

- k

--
Best Regards,
Paul

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