Mruby/C and picoruby: high level langs in low-level devices?

Using a microcontroller to interrogate itself is a really valuable debugging technique.

Generally, you have attach to a UART port and attach a terminal emulator. This is especially important when considering the plethora of sleep modes that now exist for modern SoCs. Debug probes generally put the chip in maximum performance mode which often wipes out the state your trying to debug (especially important for sleep bugs).

And by the time of Amstrad PC1512, BASIC compilers became an option as well, although originally Darthmound BASIC was compiled, CP/M systems also had compilers available, it just did not fit into 8 bit home computers, which had to wait for the 16 bit wave of home computers.

There were other high level dynamic languages with compilers like Lisp subsets, xBase/Clipper.

So if we managed back then, there is no reason to not have a tiny Ruby version nowadays for similar environments.

on the other hand, nowadays, we can just generate C code using ai.. as long as the project doesn't get too big to grasp without abstractions. ;)

This presupposes that you're doing string manipulation and raw memory moves. I don't know about other people's code, but in my own experience neither of those things are likely to be happening in embedded code. You're much more likely to pre-allocate all your memory, and use zero-copy patterns where ever possible. I never used a C-string in relation to talking to peripherals (i2c, spi, register mapped) or when doing dsp. Moreover, if you do need to use memcpy it's probably because you are doing something very low level for which memcpy is the best choice.