PyPy JIT Backend for ARM

morepypy.blogspot.com

38 points·vimes656··7 comments

Interesting. What would it take to run this on a baremetal ARM processor? There are many embedded ARM processors out there and ones running linux are a small fraction of them. There is also no reliable scripting interpreter for baremetal use except Lua.

Python's standard library includes a lot of functionality that only really makes sense on top of an operating system, e.g., filesystem operations, inter-process communication. By the time you implement that kind of thing, plus drivers to communicate with the peripherals on your embedded platform, plus a TCP/IP stack, you have an operating system. Maybe you have a small RTOS instead of Linux per se, but that's a different question than 'bare metal' (and I dare say more embedded systems are running with at least an RTOS than without).

You don't really have to have networking or files to write programs. Currently in a baremetal embedded system (I am including the RTOSes) you can write programs in C or C++. It would be very useful to be able to write programs with a main() function using python. You could write an interactive shell, device drivers, even a small operating system. So what I mean here is instead of aiming for applications, you could use python to write system software.

I think there are already lua interpreters ported in this way but python is more common and perhaps easier to use.

Having Python be accessible on mobile devices would be a boon for development, I think. I'm sure I'm not the only one who isn't all that enamored with Java or Objective-C for mobile development...

Python is the new Java. Minus Larry Ellison.

What does this even mean?

Java's major claim to fame is its cross platform compatibility. Sounds like Python is making its way across all platforms as well

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