Savi on bare metal (uC)

[mneumann]

Just came across PicoRuby, which runs a Ruby interpreter (and compiler) on Rasperry Pi Pico (RP2040). Pretty awesome!

In my opinion, Savi binaries can also be made to run on RP2040, with the following changes:

• simpler runtime: Most micro-controllers are single-core (RP2040 is dual...), so actors would be scheduled one after the other. no need for concurrency at all.
• GC: Probably the whole tracking and GC-related messages would not be needed. With single-core in mind, global heap and stop-the-world GC can be used. Alternatively, reference counting for more deterministic memory de-allocation (unsure if this would be easy to integrate).
• cross compiling: thanks to clang that should not be a big issue.

Independent thereof, it would be fun to have a truly minimal runtime that lacks high-performance but it's code would instead fit on 4 printed pages.