I may be trying to bring a foreign way of thinking into an area where perhaps there is no need for it, instead of rewiring my brain to adapt to the new field. Having said that, I can't be alone.. there have to be other Java transplants and such, trying to shorten their learning curve in the microcontroller world, even at a little run-time overhead, which some applications (like mine) should be able to afford.
It would help me enormously if there was a high-level, OO library that would abstract away much of the complexities of MSP430, "making simple things easy and complex things possible". I would love to see a Timer class, a LowPowerMode class, a Port class, a Pin class, an Interrupt class, etc.
How expensive would that be? My guess is, perhaps not very expensive, with methods inlined and then optimized away by a compiler.
Is it doable? Has it been done? Is there a need for it?
Energia seems to be one such library, and I love it. Though Energia appears to be 1) more than a run-time library, 2) so portable it does not seem to provide integrated fine-grained control over MSP430-specific features (which does not appear to be a big problem due to its ease of integration with custom C/asm code).