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What are the available interactive languages that run in tiny memory?

Answer 1

A:

Have you considered simply using the /bin/sh supplied by busybox? Or on of the smaller scripting languages they recommend?

dmckee 2009-07-04 19:31:22

I'm looking for languages that run on microcontrollers with no MMU and have such small RAM (8K-32K) that an OS is unreasonable. I will edit the question to make this more clear.

dwhall 2009-07-04 19:40:49

ucLinux doesn't have an MMU and runs on microcontrollers. It uses busybox.

DoxaLogos 2009-07-06 20:04:44

@DoxaLogos: Thanks for coming to my defense and all, but I don't think that ucLinix will run in this small a memory footprint. (I didn't read at first. Leaving the answer because it might be useful to someone else coming by.) ANyone know how small an OS you can write that will support BB?

dmckee 2009-07-06 21:00:38

Answer 2

A:

I have been using in my previous work busybox on a BlackFin.

we compiled perl + php for it, after changing s/fork/vfork/g it worked pretty good... more or less. Not having an MMU is not a good idea. The memory fragmentation will kill the server pretty easily. All I did was:

for i in `seq 1 100`; do wget http://black-fin-ip/test.php; done

It died while I was walking to my boss and telling him that the server is going to die in production :)

elcuco 2009-07-04 19:48:22

This answer is not accepted because Perl and PHP don't run in less than 32 KB of RAM. Having no MMU is a requirement. I'm working on deeply embedded systems; 32 KB is the *total* amount of RAM in the system.

dwhall 2009-07-04 20:06:30

Answer 3

+1 A:

A homebrew Forth runtime can be implemented in very little memory indeed. I know someone who made one on a Cosmac in the 1970s. The core runtime was just 30 bytes.

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells 2009-07-04 20:04:09

FORTH was already listed. This is a comment, not an answer.

dwhall 2009-07-04 20:21:46

Answer 4

+3 A:

There are a number of versions of Tcl for embedded programming:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/1363

ars 2009-07-04 21:07:17

Ettcl is too big for the 32 KB limit, but the link you gave has other smaller implementations that come close. Thank you.

dwhall 2009-07-04 21:31:06

You're right, my mistake. I edited my answer to remove that link after I realized the same thing.

ars 2009-07-04 21:33:46

Answer 5

+2 A:

I would recommend LUA (or eLUA http://www.eluaproject.net/ ). I've "ported" LUA to a Cortex-M3 a while back. From the top of my head it had a flash size of 60~100KB and needed about 20KB RAM to run. I did strip down to the bare essentials, but depending on your application, that might be enough. There's still room for optimization, especially about RAM requirements, but I doubt you can run it comfortable in 8KB.

Ron 2009-07-06 14:09:56

Thanks, but the eLua project was already on my list (see the second bullet in the question).

dwhall 2009-07-06 21:49:22

Answer 6

+1 A:

Have you considered a port in C of Tiny Basic? Or, perhaps rewriting the UCSD Pascal p-machine to your architecture from Z-80?

Seriously, though, JavaScript would make a good embedded scripting language, but I've no clue what the minimum memory requirements are for the VM + GC, nor how difficult to remove OS dependencies. I played with NJS a while back, which could possibly fit your needs. This one is interesting in that the compiler is written in JavaScript (self hosting).

James Hugard 2009-07-08 14:25:39

Answer 7

A:

Prolog - http://www.gprolog.org/

According to a google search "prolog small" the size of the executable can be made quite small by avoiding linking the built-in predicates.

Larry Watanabe 2009-09-17 18:37:31

Answer 8

A:

Erlang - http://erlang.org/

it can fit in 2MB

http://www.experts123.com/q/is-erlang-small-enough-for-embedded-systems.html

Larry Watanabe 2009-09-17 18:42:16

Answer 9

+3 A:

I hear that CHIP-8, XPL0, PicoC, and Objective Caml have been ported to graphing calculators. The Wikipedia "Lego Mindstorms" article lists a bunch of programming languages that allegedly run on the Lego RCX or Lego NXT platform. Do any of them meet your "live coding" criteria?

You might want to check out the other microcontroller Forths at the Forth wiki . It lists at least 4 Forths for the Atmel AVR: amforth (which you already mention), PFAVR, avrforth, and ByteForth.
(Links to those interpreters, as well as this StackOverflow question, are included in the "Embedded Systems" wikibook).

David Cary 2009-12-24 17:58:52

Answer 10

A:

You can take a look at very powerful AvrCo Multitasking Pascal for AVR. You can try it at http://www.e-lab.de. MEGA8/88 version is free. There are tons of drivers and simulator with JTAG debugger and nice live or simulated visualizations of all standard devices (LCDCHAR, LCDGRAPH, 7SEG, 14SEG, LEDDOT, KEYBOARD, RC5, SERVO, STEPPER...).

avra 2010-10-28 13:56:14

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What are the available interactive languages that run in tiny memory?

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