Programming Microcontrollers in OCaml: The OCaPIC Project

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 low-level 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.