Should be pretty easy, the interpreter core is damn clean and minimal. Look at arm-bare port, it should be pretty easy to convert that to a static library port. It uses 16-bit Thumb2 instruction set thought, that might involve additional hacking if you wanna target 64-bit ARM cores, which some of the latest phones have. Ping me at @errordeveloper if you wanna chat about that.

People are constantly running Java on mobile and that's very heavy. With phone storage into the gigs. There's no reason Python couldn't have been used before Micropython, except that vendors didn't want to allow it in.

Yes, I'm trying to feel out the necessary work to get Cython and other Cpython modules working by hacking the Python headers to make a plain Cpython C module compile to a micro-python compatible module. It's not clear that there are C modules yet, so maybe there's a lot of work to do, but it just struck me how much both ecosystems can benefit if the headers can indeed be backed so that C modules (and Cython modules) "just work."

My thoughts exactly. Python is a beast to embed on iOS.