A Scheme Interpreter for ARM Microcontrollers | Hacker News Reader

A Scheme Interpreter for ARM Microcontrollers

armpit.sourceforge.net

52 pointsjdmoreira5 comments

Cool project. The eLua link in the footnotes is dead the new eLua link is:

http://wiki.eluaproject.net/FrontPage

Two interesting "waves" to watch in traditional very small microcontrollers, its fun to think about which wave will hit first and have more long term impact, unix on a microcontroller like the retrobsd project to put BSD on something as small as a PIC, or high level language on very small chips like these scheme/lisp/forth/lua projects.

I was aware of uCLinux but had never heard of retroBSD :)

I've some embedded projects ideas that in the future I might want to try out. A midi sequencer or a groovebox.

I'm looking at this $4 arm board - http://www.cypress.com/documentation/development-kitsboards/...

I've been playing with PilOS:

http://picolisp.com/wiki/?PilOS

It is PicoLisp running on bare metal. It's easy to get going with qemu to experiment. The creator of PicoLisp, Alex Burger, had created a flight simulator way back when on PicoLisp. He is working on porting such things to PilOS. Interesting times...

Great project! I think Espruino is in the same niche. However Espruino looks much more "user-friendly" - it has tutorials, it explains how to build an interpreter for certain developer boards, it has lots of hardware-specific modules with documented APIs and it has a shiny IDE for newbies.

Scheme could have it all, it even fits better, since it's a smaller language and presumable a faster one. However this project looks abandoned. Also, and interpreter written in assembler would be oh so hard to debug I think.

Do you know if there are other projects with alternative languages for STM MCUs except for eLua and Espruino?

I don't think Armpit is abandoned. There was an update just before Christmas. It's not developed in the open, sadly.

Also, being written in assembler means it could become self-hosting. I think it's a very interesting project for it and have been looking for things to do with it for a while.

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