Re: Advocating Lua on an embedded systems fair

[Leo Razoumov <slonik.az@...>]

On 2/9/09, Ralph Hempel <rhempel@hempeldesigngroup.com> wrote:
>
>  I have a LOT of experience getting Lua to run on an AT91SAM7S256
>  which is an ARM7TDMI core with 256K FLASH and 64K RAM.
>
>  Using gcc, the Lua core (base,string,table,debug) and a run time
>  library take about 100K of FLASH and there's 58 K of heap available
>  after all the IO buffers and RAM code is set up.
>
>  The biggest problem with small RAM is the fragmentation of the
>  heap, and that a LOT of RAM is used up for what are essentially
>  read-only tables that hold functions.
>
>  So I can say that Lua in the deeply embedded space is possibly, but
>  it's difficult to make it dead reliable in the face of memory
>  constraints...
>
>  Ralph
>

Heap fragmentation is a bitch for sensors that have to be run
continuously without reboot for a long time. How hard is it to add
heap defragmentation to Lua's GC?

--Leo--