Microscheme: scheme for the Arduino

by ducklord • 10 years ago

67 10 10 years ago

petra• 10 years ago

> "Microscheme has a robust FFI (Foreign Function Interface) meaning that C code may be invoked directly from (ms) programs. Therefore, the power of the existing wealth of Arduino libraries is available within Microscheme. "

Arduino is c++, and c++ FFI's are really hard. So how does this FFI work ?

jrapdx3• 10 years ago

According to a quick look through the documentation, C code is called though a simple interface: (call-c-func "c-function-name" args …). OTOH it didn't appear that it's possible to call Scheme from C, which may be a disadvantage in some cases.

You are right, no mention of C++. It's not clear how much of a problem that would be. IIRC wrapping C++ in "extern C" more or less enables C++ functions to be called from C. Don't know about compatibility of Arduino libraries, but possibly this is how Microscheme FFI works.

Artlav• 10 years ago

Fun fact - "microscheme" means "integrated circuit" in Russian. Oddly fitting.

So far i don't like the fact it can't handle interrupts (unless by C code), and that it seem to ignore the C++ FFI completely.

That, and the fact that a garbage-collected language is to be run on a microcontroller - a device that is mostly used for realtime tasks. It won't be good for a quadcopter to go into a garbage collect subroutine during the control loop calculations.

Not a problem if you are aware of the issue, but how many people are?

kognate• 10 years ago

Microscheme is not garbage collected, at least according to the documentation.

technomancy• 10 years ago

There's a form of faux-garbage-collection: you can wrap any form in `free!` and the heap pointer will be reset when that form finishes: http://microscheme.org/documentation#memman

This would be awful for general-purpose programming, but on a device with only 2.5kb of RAM to begin with you can usually pre-allocate anything that needs to survive that reset. I use this in my keyboard firmware's outer loop: http://atreus.technomancy.us/firmware2

infocollector• 10 years ago

Is there python for Arduino? :)

sciurus• 10 years ago

Not AFAIK but you may be interested in https://micropython.org/

StavrosK• 10 years ago

I would recommend the ESP8266, which is a much better microcontroller, with integrated wifi and a price tag of only $2. It runs Lua, C, Javascript and, most recently, MicroPython.

lisper• 10 years ago

https://micropython.org

heinrichf• 10 years ago

See http://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/105/programming-a... for a (negative) answer.

Microscheme: scheme for the Arduino

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