minimicro-editor-themes VS circle

Last weekend I participated in Micro Jam 013, which had a theme of "Lava" and a prerequisite of "Time is Limited". As I'm a sponsor of that jam, I wasn't eligible for any prizes, but I wanted to enter anyway, both for fun and to demonstrate what can be done with MiniScript and Mini Micro.

“Coding joyfully” couldn’t be a better description of the goals of MiniScript and Mini Micro as well. MiniScript is a relatively new language, created in 2017 to provide a clean, simple, powerful, and fun language for computer programming. It’s small enough that the language core can be described in a single page. But with functions as first-class objects, support for object-oriented programming, and sophisticated handling of lists and maps, it’s powerful enough for real work.

I recently discovered a C++ library (circle) that simplifies writing C++ programs to run on the Raspberry Pi, directly "on the metal" — without any operating system. I've had a Raspberry Pi 400 on my side table for a couple years now, running the standard Linux distribution, but not getting much use. What I really wanted was an experience like the classic home computers of the 80s: turn it on, and within seconds you are at a friendly blinking cursor, waiting for you to type some BASIC (or in our case, MiniScript) code.

Since its introduction in 2017, MiniScript's community has been steadily growing. And a delightful community it is — it spans the gamut from brand-new, never-coded-before beginners to experienced software engineers.

[LANGUAGE: MiniScript]

I am sponsoring a private leaderboard/contest for people tackling AoC 2023 using MiniScript, a new(ish), simple, clean programming language. Join us! No previous experience in MiniScript is needed; check out the 1-page Quick Reference and you will quickly see what the language is like.

is MiniScript a dialect of BASIC

We've started a community collection of themes for the Mini Micro code editor at https://github.com/JoeStrout/minimicro-editor-themes. The README file there explains how to browse and install the themes therein, either temporarily, or more permanently by loading them in your startup script.

If you're a developer and feeling adventurous, you can also try building it yourself. The source is all on GitHub. It uses the circle-stdlib project (which is circle plus some additions to support much of the C and C++ standard libraries) as a submodule; hopefully I've set that up correctly, but you could always clone that separately and place it in the MiniScript-Pi folder. Check out circle's build instructions for info on setting up your toolchain. (Mac users: be careful with the configure script, which does not work properly on MacOS; find me on Discord and I'll help you fix the script or configure manually.)

I suggest checking out circle https://github.com/rsta2/circle since it's basically a library for the pi hardware. I'm doing some experiments with it myself now.

You can also run a Pi without an operating system, programming it in C or C++ probably. See for example: GitHub - rsta2/circle: A C++ bare metal environment for Raspberry Pi with USB (32 and 64 bit)

BMC64 is VICE in a trenchcoat unikernel / bare-metal framework called Circle: https://github.com/rsta2/circle

It uses the circle library (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) to provide a minimal runtime (mainly to interface with the hardware).

I experimented with circle the other day (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) Looks promising, and most likely within your knowledge of C/C++ development.

Natively would be amazing but a vast amount of work.

The way Apple moved classic MacOS from 680x0 to PowerPC was to write a tiny kernel emulator, with an API to run native stuff on the metal, and run more or less the whole OS under emulation, profile it and just translate the most speed-critical bits.

That's a lot of work for a FOSS project but given the performance delta between 1980s 680x0 and 2020s ARM, total emulation of the whole thing should be perfectly fine. It's how the PiStorm Amiga upgrade works.

https://amigastore.eu/853-pistorm.html

So all I envision is something like Aranym:

https://aranym.github.io/

... running on top of Ultibo, say:

https://ultibo.org/

Or maybe Circle:

https://github.com/rsta2/circle

Circle is a C++ bare metal programming environment for the Raspberry Pi.

The only other reasonable option would be to port it to a new platform which is popular that has a few well documented hardware interfaces so as not to create a hellish nightmare writing drivers. Maybe then you could do a one-off port to that platform (though you might have to re-target the HolyC compiler to target it instead if it is not x86_64). The Raspberry PI seems like a decent option here since there is already a baremetal C++ library supporting USB, keyboard, mouse, sound, video, and as an added bonus UART, I2C, SPI, GPIO. You would have good code examples for porting all the necessary drivers. But obviously this would still be a lot of work and the compiler would need to be re-targeted and user space adapted for running on ARM. That being said backwards compatibility is strong, ARM seems actually interested in keeping it that way (at least for now). The library I'm talking about is here: https://github.com/rsta2/circle