[ANN] MicroPython 1.5

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Nov 2015 12:08:20 -0700
> paul.hermeneutic at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> What is the possibility that MicroPython could be another build from
>> the base python.org sources? Python already gets built for a variety
>> of architectures. Could a MicroPython be another one? In that way, it
>> would always be up to date on language changes.
>
> There's zero possibility for this - MicroPython is from-scratch
> implementation carefully optimized for code size and memory usage,
> that's how it's up to 50 times smaller than CPython and can run with
> ~1000 times less RAM than CPython usually runs with.

Putting this another way: MicroPython is a *different implementation*
of Python, which just happens to be in the same language as CPython. A
number of Python implementations are listed here:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonImplementations

Each one is a distinct implementation of (some version of) the same
language spec called "Python", which is different from a build target
of CPython. For example, there are several implementations designed to
run inside a web browser, and while it's theoretically possible to
port some other Python implementation to JavaScript (which is what
PyPyJS did with PyPy), it's usually easier to instead implement
something specifically in/for JS (eg Brython). There's no way to say
"CPython, go build yourself for the platform known as Mozilla
Firefox", because that would be hopelessly inefficient.

ChrisA