Programming microcontrollers in OCaml: The OCaPIC project

Abstract

PIC microcontrollers are low-cost programmable integrated circuits,consume very little energy, but are hard to program due to very little available resources. They are traditionally programmed using lowlevel languages (e.g., assembler or subsets of C), which provide very few safeguards if any. This paper presents the issues we had to solve to successfully port a modern multi-paradigm general-purpose programming language, which notably provides automatic memory management and strong static type checking, to this rather peculiar hardware.