Smallest/cheapest possible Python platform?

[Antoine Pitrou]

Roy Smith <roy <at> panix.com> writes:
> 
> What's the smallest/cheapest/lowest-power hardware platform I can run 
> Python on today?  I'm looking for something to use as a hardware 
> controller in a battery-powered device and want to avoid writing in C 
> for this project.

It depends *which* Python. Complete Python implementations (CPython, PyPy,
IronPython, Jython) will have stronger requirements than minimal / incomplete
implementations.

As for CPython, it needs a C compiler, decent POSIX support, a 32-bit CPU at
least, and realistically you won't do much with at least 8 MB RAM.

We actually have a buildbot which regularly tests building and running of
CPython on an ARM machine:
http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/all/buildslaves/warsaw-ubuntu-arm

It's a Cortex A8 with 1GB RAM, though, so I don't know if it's in your range
(but 1GB is not needed at all, except that it's nice when running the full
regression test suite).

Regards

Antoine.