On typing, there's only a few main ones you need to worry about—strings, functions, tables and numbers. I don't think it does weird things like JS where it converts between them without asking. Luau adds some type hinting if it's a big point of concern but I haven't really looked into it much.
I know it’s probably and overreaction, but this was a compete non-starter for me.
https://typescripttolua.github.io/
I’m personally a fan of YueScript which is basically an evolution of MoonScript (but it’s not typed).
LuaJIT has ridiculously easy C interop.
The dev experience for lua is f-ing awful.
The language is small, but not “simple”; it’s stuck in 1985.
The tooling is nearly non-existent and the stuff that does exist is a joke.
The few libraries that exist are awful and barely maintained; the maintained libraries are maintained by neckbeards with a god-complex.
The community is “reimplementing everything by hand is the right way to do it AND ALSO you’re an idiot doing it wrong” toxic. There are a million good reasons why it’s only has a foothold in nginx and Roblox territory.
It’s not a joke to say that it’s f-ing terrible all the way around.
There are a LOT of tools with embedded Lua scripting capabilities.
The ease of embedding Lua, even with a C++ wrapper, is incredible. With little effort, I now have something I consider “ready”.
Not to mention, it’s a very lightweight VM.
Generally, I use pybindgen to get the basic module and then hack on that by hand. The main problem is most C(++) libraries aren't designed to interoperate with managed memory languages so most of the work is figuring that out. Don't get me wrong, I've tried to work within the binding library (with pybindgen at least) but the amount of work for anything even slightly complicated isn't really worth it.
For a project with a major python API (like blender) you're better off crafting your own python class generator (again, like blended does, and even that has some major issues around object lifetime management). Best would be to design the underlying library/application with python integration in mind but that's not always possible if you want to include other libraries.
I can say I did mess around with using lua as an embedded scripting language within an application years ago and it wasn't too difficult from what I remember. It was only ever a proof-of-concept and didn't go too far so I never ran into the inevitable edge case as one always does with these sorts of things.
All of these products are still alive today, actively supported and making my customers good money.
Some things come very natural to Lua: Lua <=> C interfacing is a breeze, and while some modern languages are still struggling to figure out how to do proper async, Lua has been able to do this for decades. The language itself is minimal and simple but surprisingly powerful - a few smart constructs like coroutines, closures and metatables allow for a lot of different paradigms.
For new projects at this scale, I would still choose Lua + C/C++ as my stack. Over the last few years I have been visiting other ecosystems to see what I'm missing out on (Elixir, Rust, Nim), and while I learned to love all of those, I found none of them as powerful, low-friction and flexible as Lua.
The experience I had there might be your best bet for something productive. That board came with a 'limited C-like compiler' (took a mostly complete subset of C syntax and transcribed it to ASM).
You'll probably be doing a lot of things like executing in place from ROM, and strictly managing stack and scratch pad use.
The 64MB of RAM and 8MB (I assume that's 64Mbit) of ROM allow for highly liberating things like compressed executable code copied to faster RAM, modify in place code, and enough spare RAM otherwise to use scripting languages and large buffers for work as desired.
Assuming your flash allows XIP (execute in place) so all that memory is available for your lua interpreter data, you should at least be able to run some code, but don't expect to run any heavy full applications on that. I don't know Berry but it sounds like a better fit for the scale of your device.
But sure, why not give it a try: Lua is usually easy to port to whatever platform, so just spin it up and see how it works for you!
Every so often I have a need for a small cheap device interoperating with a larger system that I'm developing. Like something that sits on MODBUS and does a simple task when signalled. I've taken the RP2040 and Pico board and spun it into a gizmo that can do whatever I want with Micropython, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than trying to spin it up in STMCube.
I find it difficult to take any writing seriously when it uses phrases like this.
MicroPython can be equally readable, but in practice, many projects end up with blurred layers between system code and scripting. That creates a maintenance burden as projects grow.
Yeah, right. Even if this is the case (I find it hard to belive the author has really seen 'many' sort of professional MicroPython projects), where's the proof the language used was the deciding factor in that. And not the project management for instance. Or simply the dev's architecturing abilities.
You use micrpython when you have lots of horsepower and need something fairly robust on the network.
You use C/C++ if you need precise control over power, memory or CPU. Even though if you're doing network stuff its much harder to do quickly and securely. (THere might be better embedded TLS support now)
Lua is frankly just sparkling C. Sure if someone has create a bunch of libraries for you, then great, if not, you've now go to support lua toolchain, and your own microcontrollers toolchain, and port what ever control lib the manufacturer provides yourself.
Or, as this is a marketing page, pay https://realtimelogic.com/products/xedge/ to do it for you.
It runs on a 2350.
Some concerns are valid: Arduino doesn't have as much flexibility for digging really deep into things like pin and memory assignments and what happens when a microcontroller starts up. Also, the quality and documentation of Arduino support can vary from one MCU family to another.
There's a concern about the quality of libraries and code.
It doesn't support hardware debugging.
Granted, the embedded community has good reasons for being conservative, especially for critical applications.
But I'd like to try some other compiled language someday because I'm not a big fan of C++. Any recommendations for something that works well with a Raspberry Pi Pico?
I'm also intrigued by Zig. I haven't used it for anything yet but the language looks fun and I believe platform.io supports it
Raspberry Pis are beefy enough that you could also get away with less systems-y languages. I like Kotlin. By default Kotlin needs a JVM but I think it's usable if you build native executables. However if you want to fiddle with GPIOs you might have to do it by manually setting things on/off in the filesystem (edit, sorry, just read you're using a PICO. Not sure how well Kotlin is supported)
gdscript is so awesome
jacknews•7h ago
Python does have the 'there should be one, preferably only one, way to do it' mantra, but to me it utterly fails at that, and is in fact a bit of a 'kitchen sink' or 'armchair' language.
That is it's strength in some ways, it's easy and approachable, and has more libraries than perhaps any other language, so you can usually get something working fairly quickly.
But it's not so suited to sparse environments. You can't easily turn a plump armchair with automatic footrests and telescoping side-tables into a plywood Eames.
qznc•7h ago
The problem of "easy" is that it implies hidden complexity for its magic. The problem of "simple" is that it requires more work from its users.
3036e4•4h ago
marky1991•30m ago