Re: Lua for tiny embedded system (was: Sanity check)

[Francisco Socal <socal@...>]

Hi there!

> LuaChip is still underway - but the project that was supposed to finance the
> development was moved over to another chip (PIC18) what is not usable for
> Lua. So to Luachip hardware sits in my office and is just waiting for time
> ;-)

> > Andre had a great idea of considering the generation of native code instead
> > of attempting to squeeze in the interpreter - a non-trivial task by any
> > measure.
>
> Granted, it's quite feasible to translate Lua bytecode to native code (ummm
> ... more on this later this month). But it's not helpful in your case,
> because you are not aiming for speed. You really only want to save space.

That's exactly the idea I explore in picoLua, a Lua bytecode to PIC16xxx 
assembly translator:

http://lapsi.eletro.ufrgs.br/~socal/projects/picoLua

Obviously many Lua constructions are lost and/or not supported, but the core 
language/LVM is very easily mapped to the PIC's RISC-like instruction set.

There are even some extensions to allow inline assembly, direct access to the 
PIC registers, and so on. And it is, of course, implemented in Lua. But 
unfortunately I wasn't able to compile itself to PIC :)

Francisco