RE: Advocating Lua on an embedded systems fair

["John Hind" <john.hind@...>]

Yes, a well designed and useful poster.

One nit-pick. I would prefer to quote "reasonable practical minimum"
requirements rather than the absolute minimum achievable in a pure
benchmarking exercise. On this basis 100K of flash seems low, and in the
embedded context it would be useful to talk about RAM also as these
resources are often very tight on embedded chips.

I would suggest that an important threshold has just recently been crossed
enabling a single chip Lua implementation to be a practical possibility:
512K Flash, 64K RAM (both bytes) with a 32Bit processing core. So far I've
only found one chip in this class, the Atmel AVR32, but other manufacturers
such as Microchip and Texas will no doubt soon catch up. I'm pretty sure in
my own mind that 512K is the practical minimum for a full Lua system with
libraries and space for the application (though a pure runtime virtual
machine might make do with half that). I'm less confident I understand the
RAM requirements though - any comments anyone?

In passing, it would be useful to have an open-source "Lua Chip" offering
on the pattern of the Arduino project (google it!), but aiming at the
higher-end of the microcontroller spectrum. A full Lua system with
networking, USB and extensive analog and digital i/o for under $30 should be
a feasible proposition! Anyone interested in a project to this effect?

-----Original Message-----
From: Timm S. Mueller Sent: 07 February 2009 16:33

Ok. My goal was to create a poster in A1 format (594 x 841mm), summing
up "Why should I use Lua" on an embedded systems fair as precisely and
in as few words as possible.

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