Python for small systems (ucLinux)

[Paul Rubin]

"David Brown" <david at no.westcontrol.spam.com> writes:
> I am going to be writing an application that will run on a ucLinux system.
> It works mostly like a real Linux system (except there is no MMU, meaning no
> virtual memory and no protection between process' memory areas), but is a
> lot more limited in resources compared to most Linux systems - perhaps 4 MB
> Flash and 8 MB Ram in total.  Does anyone know of projects using python in
> such limited systems?  Obviously I'll be looking for a limited and cut-down
> version of python - I'll only want a tiny fraction of the available
> libraries, and will not need to handle source code interpretation or
> compilation - I would generate .pyc compiled files on a normal Linux system.
> Basically, what I need is the python byte-code interpreter, along with a few
> critical libraries.
> 
> Since the alternative (write the app in C/C++) will undoutably take more
> time and effort than writing the app in python, I am happy to work on such a
> system, rather than expecting to find a complete, ready-to-run package, but
> I would much prefer to find out about existing efforts and opinions as to
> how feasable this is before wading in myself.

You might look at Pippy.  I think you can use Python in a system that
small, but it will consume quite a lot of those resources.  It may not
be all that feasible, if you want to have much space left for your
application.

That said, there are many other "small" script and extension languages
you can use, that maybe aren't as nice as Python, but which use much
less memory.  For example, look at Siod (small Scheme subset), Tcl,
or even Forth if you're a real masochist and need to run on tiny hardware.