Why the constant obsession to apply a technology designed for a specific purpose everywhere else, even when it doesn't make sense?
Not to say that's valid in this instance, but plenty of early VMs were entirely made to improve resource constrained hardware
If you tell me is a toy, and somebody's pet project: fine. Is all about having fun.
But then don't mention "professional" in the project description.
This isn't in competition with C or C++, it's in competition with micropython. Python isn't a great language except in its ubiquity. I'd rather work in what I know, which is TS. This opens up microcontroller development to JavaScript devs of whom there are a lot of us.
Types are really helpful when dealing with unfamiliar APIs. When doing embedded projects, you deal with a lot of APIs. There are the language built ins, any libraries you are using to interface with peripherals. This project opens up microcontroller development in a big way to a LOT of developers.
Is it what you want to use for a commercial embedded device? I can't say. Is that the only standard? Then you should just be using C for everything, I guess. But something like a Raspberry Pi Pico or ESP32 has plenty of resources to run JavaScript while still being able to manage a weather station or automated garden or security camera or pen plotter. There are lots of applications that don't use the full power of the board.
Instead of ctrl+f for "professional" I suggest re-reading it
>professional TypeScript developer experience
It is about experience of sane programming environment, right?
Unless you have a background in C/C++ already, most people can probably get up and running with something like this way, way faster.
const x: boolean | undefined | null = getValue(); const not_x: boolean = !!!y
I added TS type annotation for clarity, although could be inferred if `getValue` is typed accordingly.
return
<p>
A JSX paragraph
</p>
In TypeScript, at least, you get yelled at for this.
By having somebody else do it. Abstraction is a wonderful thing.
These days... eh - pretty hard disagree with everything you've said.
Do some folks still need to know the ins & outs of the device? Sure. Will this work on every device? Nope.
Does that matter for the success of this project? Not a fucking bit.
Honestly - this looks a lot like Electron in my opinion: It gives companies a very cheap entry point into a whole realm of tooling that was previously out of bounds.
They can do it without having to hire new folks, they can prototype and run with it as far as they'd like, and then 3 years in, once the product is real and they know they have a market - they can turn around and pay someone to optimize the embedded devices for cost/power/performance/other.
The flow isn't catch-22 AT ALL. The flow is: I'm trying to do a thing that's only marginally related to the embedded device, and it's nifty that I can do that with low entry costs (both financial and knowledge).
---
By the time you are under NDA for a new device... you are established enough to be making your own decisions around tooling (basically - you are part of phase 2: optimize).
It's too bad that this comment is buried so deep: it should be at top level. More and more often, embedded work is just like this -- the business logic is far more important than the fact that it's running on an "embedded device." And in those cases, having programmers who understand modern software development at a high level is far more useful than having programmers who are expert in C and comfortable sitting down with multiple chip datasheets for a week, writing peripheral drivers.
Same problem for MicroPython. Same problem for LUA, same problem for any scripting language running on constrained MCU.
For example, it supports ESP32.
Every problem sure starts to look like a ESP32 nail if I have this tool chain available.
For my day job, I use STM32/C++ because it's what the company has standardized on. For my side gig/consulting work, I've pretty much standardized on ESP32 because it's cheap, has lots of resources and good community, and I can leverage the Arduino ecosystem. It's grossly overkill for a lot of projects but no-one cares. Clients just care that you can ship fast.
My next step is moving the side gig work to MicroPython or some other higher-level language that lets me code much faster than C/C++.
That was my point - the ESP32 is so versatile and cheap, it's my go-to these days for pretty much everything.
Being about to have an easy and reasonably powerful js runtime for that sounds great.
Apparently node-red also has something for esp32?
And I haven't tried it, but low.js looks cool too [1]