Hi Bastard, one of the main reasons PyPy gets funded by the EU was the promise to port Python to embedded systems ( but not necessarily very memory restricted ones ). The project seems to be in a state where the team tries to get rid of the CPython runtime alltogether and reaching some autonomy. The idea of providing a Forth backend would fit into the concept and would be great IMO.
Maybe You should also have a look on the JavaCard platform specification for inspiration what is possible for an OO language on time and memory resticted platforms. http://java.sun.com/products/javacard/specs.html Since there are vendors that implemented the JVM on smartcards against SUNs spec and JavaCards are on the market ( not just research prototypes ) the approach has been proven successfull. For the matter of memory layout I would naively try to adapt the type inferencer ( annotator in PyPy slang ) and restrict Python to an even more smaller subset than RPython ( SmartJava does not even support strings. On the other hand the explicit casting to short and byte types is by no means braindead ). I currently don't have an idea for memory management and I'm not even sure about implicit or explicit finalization. Kay -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list