nesper
ferret
nesper | ferret | |
---|---|---|
9 | 8 | |
184 | 1,065 | |
- | - | |
2.8 | 0.0 | |
3 months ago | almost 2 years ago | |
C | Makefile | |
Apache License 2.0 | BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License |
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Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
nesper
- Show HN: Program ESP32s in Nim
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Microsoft DeviceScript – TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices
I use Nim on embedded precisely for that reason: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper
I wtapped much of zephyr as well but that ones less used: https://github.com/embeddednim/nephyr
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Nim 2.0.0 RC2
Nim supports both since it compiles with pretty much any C89 C compiler. Also https://github.com/elcritch/nesper :)
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Introduction to Embedded Systems Programming (Ada)
Checkout Nim! I've used it to great effect for embedded programming. It has memory management system based on non-atomic reference counting (arc) so its fast and deterministic. It has optional cycle collection too (orc). Its easy to mixin manual memory as well.
I used F# a bit and learned a lot from it, and the same with Elixir. Nim is procedural it has an "enlightened procedural" take that feels like functional programming in some ways. Partly thats due to the very powerful type system - for example Nim lets you define custom distinct (not aliased) number types just like F#. Nim also inherits a fair bit from Pascal and so shares points with Ada like ints with custom ranges. Theres some rough points, but largely its made me enjoy programming again.
The esp32 is a good route since they're easy to setup. I wrote a wrapper for esp-idf which is used in production in at least two embedded shops: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper
You can run it on Arduinos as well. Theres a pure Nim setup called Ratel and a rp2040 wrapper too. :)
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Ask HN: Who is using C++ as the main language for new project?
You should checkout Nim! I use it extensively on embedded. Nim is fantastic to program in if you're an experienced C/C++ developer. Its safer and smarter but not not pedantic about it.
Nim compiles to C or C++ so its easy to use on any embedded platform and compiler suite. Thats still huge for embedded. Rust forces a type-trait centric programming style which makes interfacing hardware/embedded harder as you have to make type heavy HALs everywhere -- hence the lack of rtos & library support despite its relative popularity).
Its pretty trivial to re-use any C/C++ libraries which gives a big boost to the native ecosystem. I wrapped most of the esp32 idf in a few weeks: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper
The new GC (ARC) is basically a built in `shared_ptr` or `Rc`. You can also do stack-based programming too and the compiler enforces a safe memory accesses. The performance is great and can match or beat C/C++ if you do a few hours of tuning. Though its easy kill performance if you're lazy (e.g. parse json into a bunch of heaps objects), but that can have its place.
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Launching the 2021 Nim Community Survey
I would really like to see more work on improving the use of Nim for programming microcontrollers. I stumbled on to https://github.com/elcritch/nesper recently and it looks neat, but I had issues getting my code to compile. Improved support for other MCUs like the esp8266 and atmega32u4 would be really cool and useful. It would be nice to have Nim as a higher level alternative to micropython or lua in the embedded world (your only other real alternatives being C/C++ or Rust).
I also found this https://disconnected.systems/blog/nim-on-adruino
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Nim Version 1.6 Released
Well no language is perfect, but Nim can be used in almost every domain because of it's compilation targets(C, C++, JS) and it's fast compile times(who needs interpretation when compile times are that fast!):
* Shell scripting, I still assume most people will just use Bash tho: https://github.com/Vindaar/shell
* Frontend: https://github.com/karaxnim/karax or you could bind to an existing JS library.
* Backend: For something Flask-like: https://github.com/dom96/jester or something with more defaults https://github.com/planety/prologue
* Scientific computing: the wonderful SciNim https://github.com/SciNim
* Blockchain: Status has some of the biggest Nim codebases currently in production https://github.com/status-im?q=&type=&language=nim&sort=
* Gamedev: Also used in production: https://github.com/pragmagic/godot-nim and due to easy C and C++ interop, you get access to a lot of gamedev libraries!
* Embedded: this is a domain I know very little about but for example https://github.com/elcritch/nesper or https://github.com/PMunch/badger for fun Nim+embedded stuff!
Most of the disadvantages come from tooling and lack of $$$ support.
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Why doesn’t V8 fit on my microcontroller?
Not quite sure if I follow what you're saying. As in Tasmota/Berry do or do not do more than provide I2C/SPI?
> If one wants to do serious stuff they would use an appropriate RTOS and program it in C.
It's unfortunate, but still largely appears to be the case. I find C very time consuming to program, so I ported Nim to FreeRTOS [1]. It's _very_ nice being able to go from writing highly optimized ISR functions to high level JSON parsing in one language. Add in defaulting to memory safety but with no pause-the-world GC. I tried Rust but it seems more difficult to integrate into existing world RTOS'es, flashers, Swagger debuggers, etc.
Though, I've been curious what running a WASM VM would be like? One could integrate any language: C++, C, Nim, Rust, etc. Would be interesting.
> MongooseOS does more than this if we're talking ESP32, also other devices, Javascript, C, C++, commercial support, cloud based OTA upgrades and integration with AWS, Azure, Google and IBM Watson IoT cloud services.
MongooseOS does seem interesting, but very targeting a niche market with prebuilt needs? For future RTOS'es I think ZephyrOS [2] has a lot of potential given it's now supported by NXP [3], TI, and others but is independent of any given (cloud) vendors or other IoT companies. Some might not like the CMake based build system, but in my view all the RTOS build systems are terrible in their own special way.
1: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper
- uLisp
ferret
- How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)
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Ferret: A functional, lazy language for realtime embedded control systems
Seems like there has been no development since 2020 - https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong
The whole of ferret's source code is in a single org-mode file, following the literate programming style: https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret/blob/master/ferret.org
- Clojure – Differences with Other Lisps
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Learning Clojure made me return back to C/C++
fyi there's some middle ground via ferret if you want to mix the two in the future. I think janet lang is more full featured, borrowing ideas from clojure while targeting simple embedding alongside c.
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uLisp
Another commenter already mentioned Gambit Scheme. That provides for inline C and therefore very easy interop with external libraries. It still has a runtime and GC though - those might pose a problem depending on your platform and task.
Ferret (https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret) and Carp (https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp) are both Lisp-like low level languages. Both seem to be fairly experimental in nature though.
> anything but C
Taking you literally, Rust and D can both compile for bare metal. D in particular has a "Better C" subset. (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html)
In the same vein, Terra is a C like language (manual memory management) that you metaprogram with Lua. (https://github.com/terralang/terra)
Taking you very literally, Forth is also an option.
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Writing a whole program in Org Mode
Impressive. Wonder how the performance in Emacs will be with a file this big... org source file
What are some alternatives?
quickjs-esp32 - QuickJS port for ESP32
janet - A dynamic language and bytecode vm
nim-esp8266-sdk - Nim wrapper for the ESP8266 NON-OS SDK
ulisp - A version of the Lisp programming language for ATmega-based Arduino boards.
ecl
Carp - A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications.
Lua-RTOS-ESP32 - Lua RTOS for ESP32
embedded-hal - A Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for embedded systems
etaoin - Pure Clojure Webdriver protocol implementation
Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).
Fennel - Lua Lisp Language