Josh Grams wrote: > I have always wondered how far in that direction you could go with > Scheme or another high-level dynamic language. In my (again, fairly > uninformed) opinion it seems mainly a question of how much of the > dynamic stuff can be analysed and compiled down to static code to reduce > the runtime size/speed costs, and whether you can give the programmer > the fine-grained control over memory usage that they might need for such > limited systems.
Take a look at the paper "PICOBIT: A Compact Scheme System for Microcontrollers" by Vincent St-Amour and Marc Feeley: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/StAmourFeeleyIFL09.pdf They implement a cross development system to run Scheme in less than 7KB of memory in Microchip PC18 microcontrollers. For those of us who prefer native systems to cross development, "The LISP Implementation for the PDP- 1 Computer" by L. Peter Deutsch and Edmund C . Berkeley is an interesting text from 1984: > http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/pdp-1/DEC.pdp_1.1964.102650371.pdf That Lisp system needed at least 2000 registers (roughly equivalent to 4500 bytes) to run, though it could make use of larger configurations. Unlike PICOBIT, this is a fully interactive operating system. http://simh.trailing-edge.com/kits/lispswre.zip -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
