PPC, MIPS, SH?

But the issue is twofold, you need a specialized GC for systems with memory limitations (and/or some realtime requirements)

I think GCCGO should work for PPC and MIPS, not sure about SH, but is worth a try.

I suppose it depends on just how "embedded" what you're dealing with is. Clearly, something like Go is bigger and slower than C, so there will be places where it's not useful. I could certainly see it being useful elsewhere though.

You need a deterministic memory management.

For what? Android does fine without it, if you still consider that embedded. Java is used in a wide variety of embedded systems without trouble.

Sure, there are some places that can't use Go. But there are also places that cant use dynamically allocated memory or recursion. Not all embedded systems are safety critical or need to be absolutely deterministic.

Actually, from conversations with the Android team, Android system and apps code goes to great effort to use manual free lists and object recycling to avoid allocations during animations. Manual memory management is necessary to compete with the manually-memory-managed iOS frameworks. And Dalvik has an incremental, generational GC...