Re: dsPIC33F Lua support (Was: Advocating Lua on an embedded systems fair)

[Bogdan Marinescu <bogdan.marinescu@...>]

> On that device I'd have to check, but the problem with PICs in
> general is that they separate code and data accesses to different
> busses and instructions.

You don't really care about that with Lua, unless you're planning to
add loadable C modules to the system. But since the compiler is based
on GCC, and GCC doesn't know about multiple memory spaces, you'll have
a problem with C "const" data on such systems, because it will be
simply copied to RAM (which is already tight) and accessed from there.
But there are some other compilers seem to know how to handle this
issue (don't know if one exists for the dsPIC though)/

>
> And once you add an external memory device, you might as well look at
> a different CPU architecture that has the RAM and FLASH you need onone
> device.

I second that. If you don't need DSP extensions, a "standard" ARM
would be better (and even if you need to do DSP you might find that an
ARM core is perfectly OK for your needs; once again, it all depends on
the application).

Best,
Bogdan