Footprint of Lua on a PPC Micro

Question

We're developing some code on Freescale PPC micros (5517 and 5668 at the moment), and I was wondering if we could put Lua on them.

The devices need to be easily programmed/reconfigured in the field, and the current product uses a proprietary interpreted logic language that can be loaded in, and our software (written in C) runs an interpreter. I would like to move to a better language (the implementation is a bit buggy and slow), so I'm considering Lua, but the memory footprint must be very low. For the 5517 (which we may not use), the maximum RAM is 80K. Things are better on the 5668, with 592K of RAM.

So does anyone know if I can put Lua on bare metal? We're effectively not running an OS. If so, are there any estimates on what kind of memory footprint we might see? How much effort it would take?

Failing this, does anyone know of any kind of interpreter that might be better in a memory-constrained environment without an OS? Or are we better just rolling our own?

Answer 1

See the eLua project.