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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

As a hobbyist I just use Arduino (via platformio). I don't think I need an interpreter of any sort for microcontrollers because recompiling and uploading the flash on hobbyist boards is quick and easy.

But I'd like to try some other compiled language someday because I'm not a big fan of C++. Any recommendations for something that works well with a Raspberry Pi Pico?

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I'm not an expert but from what I've seen Rust is one of the big alternatives. It's new enough to be trendy and fixed a lot of C++ issues whole being mature enough that the tooling is ok.

I'm also intrigued by Zig. I haven't used it for anything yet but the language looks fun and I believe platform.io supports it

Raspberry Pis are beefy enough that you could also get away with less systems-y languages. I like Kotlin. By default Kotlin needs a JVM but I think it's usable if you build native executables. However if you want to fiddle with GPIOs you might have to do it by manually setting things on/off in the filesystem (edit, sorry, just read you're using a PICO. Not sure how well Kotlin is supported)

The Pi Pico is a microcontroller, not a full linux-capable SBC. The confusion is helped by the fact that Raspberry Pi has a bunch of variants and almost all of them are SBCs.

Nim is a likely a pretty good option, see https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/picostdlib/tree/master

Toit from the v8 devs is also pretty cool.

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