MicroPython on M68k Mac | Hacker News Reader

MicroPython on M68k Mac

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55 pointszdw6 comments

Although you could get Python 1.x for 68k Macs already: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython/macpython-older.htm... (the "Even older" bit mentions that 1.5.2 is the last 68k version).

Admittedly, I think this Micropython port is seemingly more targeting a Mac Plus, whilst I suspect the original Mac Python would probably prefer a Quadra (or a PowerMac).

It seems like it might not be that hard to port all the classic mac os code from python 1.5.2 to this.

Reminds me of AREXX on the amiga.

REXX was an okay enough language for the time, but the real benefit was not needing to install a compiler -- which required more memory typically than my Amiga had, IIRC.

Meanwhile in college everyone had the 486 chip that could fit in a 386 socket. And I would have bought one, but I was broke. I ended up getting a pentium system with 64MB of ram that ran Linux after my first job.

One detail that I'd be interested to see are startup times for the MicroPython environment. Having compiled both Lua and Duktape (an embedded friendly ES7 runtime) for a Macintosh Classic, morally a Plus, I regularly got startup times of up to a minute - I think most of it due to the sheer size of the resulting binaries and standard libraries.

It's obviously not directly comparable - each port will be different - but startup time is <50ms on an RP2040 (Cortex M0 @133MHz):

https://github.com/micropython/micropython/issues/8420

That's a useful comparison since it gives some insight to some important differences: part of the difference might be an order of magnitude increase in clock speed (say from 15 MHz to 133+ MHz); another might be an increase in I/O speed. A final one might be memory pressure - classic Mac OS applications conservatively specified memory to reserve in advance since they shared the same memory space, and a lot of purging/reloading of nonessential relocatable resources might be happening.

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