alt Hacker NewsBackground for folks that are not into MicroPython. This release is so important because MicroPython is almost completely able to replace lower level languages like C for many embedded use cases on the RP20[45]0 and ESP32 and other MCUs at this point, being very solid, fast enough (and thanks to Viper and inline assembly abilities even super fast for critical code paths), portable across MPUs (super important: you can change MCU without rewriting everything), has very good support for SPI and other protocols, and so forth. But... the problem is, before this release MicroPython suffered not the CPU shortage, but RAM shortage: the bytecode needed to stay in memory, and once the program becomes big enough, memory is the bottleneck that limits the project size. To avoid that, you could build your own MicroPython binary with your frozen bytecode inside, in the device flash part, but... if I need to rebuild MicroPython part of the advantage of using it is gone (super fast development cycle is one of those). Well, now, with ROMFS, this is no longer true, MP itself is able to store bytecode in the device flash and execute from there. This makes MP a lot more practical for large embedded projects.
Replies
I needed to whip up a small embedded hardware widget for a very large machinery project and with an Adafruit Feather + MicroPython I had the thing working in a day and respun the schematic into a working board by the end of the week. An RP2040 plus QSPI flash is a freaking dollar in the BOM, and that's priced in onesies from DigiKey.
I'm never going back my old standby (C on an NXP LPC4). This is the new normal and it's fantastic. I'm really excited to see ROMFS working on this part soon.
I see it as another take on BASIC for microcontrollers, like BASIC Stamp or mikroBasic, with a language that is more appealing to current generations.
We were able to already do so much on home computers back in the day, in an interactive development enviroment, no need to reach out for C in hardware that is x times better than those home computers.
> MicroPython's inline assembler now supports 32-bit RISC-V assembly code via the newly implemented @micropython.asm_rv32 decorator. This allows writing small snippets of RISC-V machine code that can be called directly from Python code. It is enabled on the rp2 port when the RP2350 is running in RISC-V mode.
Exciting!
Thank you for explaining and giving context.
Strong endorsement! I would like to add that MicroPython can also be extended in C by writing small (or large) modules in C that one can call from Python. There is a module variant that can be installed at runtime (via package manager) called dynamic native modules. This enables extending with native code without having to rebuild or reflash the firmware.