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seren

I wonder why the comparison table does not include FreeRTOS or Zephyr.

From a high level view, I don't really what's really different for RIOT OS

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The website hasn't been updated in a while, back then Zephyr wasn't thing yet…

But FreeRTOS has been around for quite some time with wide support among HW manufacturers, so why not include that?

FreeRTOS doesn't come with drivers or a networking stack, it's more a building block than a whole operating system.

I would read the extensive list of features and look at the code first before hurling content-free FUD. It even supports Arduino too.

https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/tree/master/cpu

Found some answers on another HN thread :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19016945

But asking questions is not spreading FUD in my book

Not comparing to Zephyr, which ticks all the same boxes, is absolutely a problem.

And I would argue that Arduino support nowadays is a negative, not a positive. Arduino support means that you are going to do a bunch of things to support 8 and 16 bit systems that look absolutely silly on 32 bit systems. And, it's not even clear that Arduino systems are actually cheaper or lower power than ARM Cortex-M4 systems anymore--which negates the advantage of Arduinos.

I completely switched to the Adafruit Feather M4 series for my hobby electronics about 5 years ago. Each board might be a little more expensive than a base Arduino, but they are way more powerful and have a lot of great features.

If you want to go "budget", STM32 hardware (like the common "blue pill" STM32F103C8 board) is priced comparably to a knockoff Arduino, if not cheaper.

You can now get much more powerfull STM32F411CEU6 boards for the same price.

Which boards are you thinking of? "Blue pill" STM32F103C8 boards are $2 to $3, if you're willing to run the risk of getting a cloned microcontroller. (The clones are actually quite usable for most purposes.)

The clones even tend to have more memory.

But I was thinking of those boards: https://aliexpress.com/item/4000103610226.html

(also supported by RIOT btw https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/12778)

Oh, those! I have one of the F401 models -- I didn't know there was a F411 variant, though, nor that they've gotten so cheap. There might be a purchase in my future. :)

Some clones even have chip errata fixed.

Those M4's are handy! I use the Adafruit Itsy M4s. Wait does this support them?!

For a similar reason I switched over the Wemos Mini-D1. In my case having onboard Wifi is usually more important to me than having extra I/O ports.

> Arduino support means that you are going to do a bunch of things to support 8 and 16 bit systems that look absolutely silly on 32 bit systems.

[citation required]

Not sure why you're being downvoted. ISAs like avr, 8051, and msp430 aren't really any crazier than arm. The archs that are a pain aren't because they're 8/16 bit.

Just talking about memory--far pointers, banks that have to be switched in and out, non-uniform memory accesses, etc.

Putting those into a compiler puts an enormous amount of surface into a compiler that is completely useless on 32-bit architectures.

...and then you can start to use mbed.

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