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2816 Lisp cells (11264 bytes). A bit on the small side, but you get 5ms garbage collections because the memory is so tiny.

We need more little systems that are somewhere between underpowered Arduinos and entire Linux systems.

If only Blackberry hadn't killed off open-source QNX. A board with a few megabytes of RAM and QNX in ROM would be a nice system for many embedded applications. You get processes, threads, message passing, and real-time scheduling. But disks, users accounts, networking, etc. are optional add-ons. Nice for embedded applications where you need to control hardware but have other things to do as well.

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> 2816 Lisp cells (11264 bytes). A bit on the small side,

More than the memory you would have on a small PDP-6 LISP system! Enough to run PROLOG: :)

https://www.t3x.org/lisp64k/logic.html

These days an ESP-8266 is scarcely more expensive than the ATmega128 and has a lot more memory, in fact the ESP32 is only a few cents/pennies/kroner more, even an ATmega328 would give twice as much memory.

I wonder if uLisp is portable to the ESP.

According to the uLisp site [0], there are actually already implementations for both the ESP32 and 8266 (linked to the 8266 page). It’s definitely awesome how cheap such powerful stuff is these days.

[0] http://www.ulisp.com/show?2CF9

There’s esp-lisp

https://github.com/yesco/esp-lisp

Sure it fits perfectly: https://aaron-fischer.net/tdn (sorry, post is written in German)

It looks like this is using the ATmega 1284 which has 4 times the flash (128 kB vs 32 kB) and 8 times the RAM (16 kB vs 2 kB) as the 328.

Oops, sorry, missed the significance of the trailing 4.

I think ESP32 fits nicely that purpose.

They are surely more powerful that the Amstrad PC1512 that we used to play Defender of the Crown back in the high school computer club.

And MS-DOS had plenty of nice high level languages to choose from.

However even those 5ms might not be an issue, if the chip is doing single purpose tasks, like wake-up, do its thing, go to sleep, like opening a garage door, read a measurement and send it off, ...

> We need more little systems that are somewhere between underpowered Arduinos and entire Linux systems.

That's not a lot of gap; openwrt is tiny and "embedded" boards grow more powerful every year. Every time I see a new board, one of my first questions is, "does it have enough RAM+flash for Linux?" and we're getting close - if the teensy 4.1 had a touch more ram it'd work (well, uclinux, but still).

It's not the hardware, it's the headaches. A Linux system needs a lot of stuff, which offers a big attack surface. Real-time OSs have less excess baggage.

Okay, so use micropython or such; we're closing the gap from all sides.

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