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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

As an alternative to C and now Rust, after developing for about a month, every day, a moderately large ESP32 project with MicroPython, I feel like suggesting it for most projects. I even wrote the driver of a chip connected to my devices (the sx1276 LoRa radio), and the experience has been very positive.

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I also really like MicroPython! Having said that, I have been working on an alternative to it for a number of years now -- primarily to provide a more robust and performant high-level alternative to C and Rust on the ESP32-family of chips:

https://github.com/toitlang/toit

I'd love to pick your brain and fully understand your experience with MicroPython. I've been doing programming languages for a number of years now, and I find that it is incredibly useful to understand what developers appreciate (and dislike) about the available stacks.

I've looked at Toit (and love MicroPython), but the reason why I don't use either for my hobby projects is that the ecosystem is so large with C++, that it doesn't make sense to use anything else.

Do I write MicroPython, a language I know well, but that has a few libraries, or do I stumble my way around C++ in an ecosystem that has basically everything? The choice has been very easy so far.

That's a fair and valid point. I firmly believe that live reloading of individual apps on your ESP32 during development is a big win for productivity, but clearly so is an established and mature ecosystem.

Is there any way to easily interoperate with C++ libraries? That would basically solve the problem.

One can relatively easily extend MicroPthon, but then you of course have to rebuild and reflash. Hot loading of native libraries I haven't seen.

There are ways and we've seen successful integration of C++ libraries and functionality - but it is not what I would call easy yet.

Toit is evolving rapidly and we find that being fully open source helps our users tweak things where necessary. It's been a fun ride so far and we've got some pretty awesome and sophisticated use cases that involve custom C++ code.

I'll definitely give it a go, it looks very interesting!

What great news! The support for the sx1276 is awful. I was digging around your github, you're referring to Freakwan[1], right?

[1] https://github.com/antirez/freakwan

Yep indeed! FreakWAN. Yesterday we tested a the first networks here in Catania and in the nearby Palazzolo. Everything is starting to work :)

It has some 8 bit BASIC feeling to the whole experience.

Does tinygo support esp32? It looks like an accessible option as well.

Yes, but unfortunately not the wifi of the esp32

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