FW: Finally a PIC32 with FPU for embedded Lua on MIPS

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

@KHMan - Why do you regard this PIC32/MIPS chip a breakthrough? ARM
microcontrollers with FPU and on-chip memory matching or exceeding these
specs have been available for several years now. Loading eLua on a blank
chip or a standard prototyping board usually involves setting up a C
cross-compiler tool chain and purchasing an ICE - once you've done that you
may as well program in C! The kickstarters provide simple, low cost, ready
to go system that you can immediately start programming in the scripting
language. There is a big step from a single chip to a two-chip board
(although the latter can be amazingly low cost if the volume is sufficient).
This is because a RAM interface needs a lot of pins which generally requires
a BGA package which in turn requires a multi-layer PCB.

@Bogdan Marinescu - JavaScript was originally (and still is of course) a
browser embedded language designed from the start to be event-driven (if
indeed it was ever consciously designed!). Node.JS is a much more recent
development that leverages this legacy as an event-driven server language.
Of course, other languages can be used in the same way, but it will be more
of a force-fit since they were not originally designed to be event-driven.
However Lua's coroutines suggest a further evolution of the event-driven
model. Rather than running functions in response to events, we could resume
coroutines on events. This would avoid some of the problems with maintaining
context in Node.JS. For example you could have a coroutine to respond to an
input stream which could execute "yield until more data arrives" and the
buffering could all be implemented in local variables. Similarly, "yield for
x milliseconds" would be a useful construct to have available in a real-time
system.

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