Project status?

[kay-is]

Hey @elcritch,

thanks for creating this project!

I'm thinking about using Nim for my Xiao nRF54L15 Sense and found this project.

What's the status here?

Is a big lift to get this working with a current version of Zephyr and adding new boards?

Or would I be better off to just run Nim with --compileOnly and use the tools supplied by Nordic? (e.g., nRF Connect SDK etc.)

[elcritch]

You're welcome - Nim is fantastic on embedded devices! Though you need to be willing to get your feet a bit wet, but Claud Code or OpenAI Codex both really help with making good wrappers for C libraries.

As you can see Nephyr is pretty stale as I'm no long working on it. Zephyr is a powerful platform but also has pain points.

I'd say you could try using it, but note that it'll require some elbow grease to dig into it. I think the wrappers around the Zephyr RTOS kernel should be stable. However the tooling around building and devices is likely outdated as Zephyr iterats a lot on those.

The core kernel and networking should be pretty easy as Nim's stdlib supports both embedded IP stacks better now.

The biggest pain point I'd never solved with Zephyr and Nim was the device mapping which showed up in painful ways since it's built on C hackery.

Is a big lift to get this working with a current version of Zephyr and adding new boards?

It's unclear how hard getting a new version of Zephyr would be to wrap. Updating my Nim esp32 wrapper nesper took a few days with the help of OpenAI Codex.

New boards are pretty easy to get running with Nephyr if your Zephyr version supports them.

Or would I be better off to just run Nim with --compileOnly and use the tools supplied by Nordic? (e.g., nRF Connect SDK etc.)

Really depends on what you're going for. If you want to play around with an RTOS diving into Nephyr would be a great way to learn.

If you don't need RTOS features or extras like OTA the easier route might be to dive more into Nordic specific wrappers.

Personally if I wanted to use a board outside of ESP32's I'd probably consider the direct approach of using the vendor tools and add in an RTOS separately if wanted. Ultimately Zephyr just took the vendor device sdks and adds a layer on top of them.

Though I've been eyeing RTEMS as an interesting RTOS choice too. I'll note that ESP32 Xiao modules are pretty great though and esp32-idf has been far more stable than Zephyr. Though esp32's are more power hungry than Nordic nRF54L15's.

[kay-is]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'll probably go for the nRF Connect SDK, as it's built on Zephyr.

Yeah, I went for the Nordic one because of the power consumption. It's pretty new, so I hope there will be quite some updates in the near future. Also, Zephyr seems to be new-ish too, so it's probably worth to try.

[elcritch]

BTW, someone’s been working on pure Nim bringup of Nordic chips: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/13532

[dwhall]

Hello @kay-is, I'm the author of a little project that starts with getting Nim to run on a nRF52480. I imagine there are differences in targetting a nRF54xxx, but there may be some useful overlap. If you want to talk more, smash these together and append gmail dot com: dwhall 256

[kay-is]

@dwhall when I looked into Rust for my project, I found this issue regarding changes in the newer nRF models:

embassy-rs/nrf-softdevice#259

Might be of your interest, if you don't already know it.

[elcritch]

BTW, regarding Zephyr, some of their repos can be useful for getting an access to the HAL libraries / binaries from the manufacturers. Zephyr pulls those in from separate git repos maintained by the manufacturers for Nordic, STM, etc.

This looks to be the HAL for Nordic: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/hal_nordic