[Vm-dev] musing on StackInterpreter FreeRTOS VM target

[Ben Coman]

Just sharing something thats been circling my head for a while
about a possible OpenSmalltalk based IoT platform.

Many micro-controllers support FreeRTOS
  https://www.freertos.org/RTOS_ports.html
including the ARMv7
  https://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS_Features.html
and the ESP32 (based on Cadence's Tensilica Xtensa LX6)
  https://www.espressif.com/en/media_overview/news/espressifs-esp32-support-amazon-freertos

Of particular interest is Amazon's adoption of FreeRTOS
and its change of license from GPLv2 to MIT.
  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-kernel-v10/

If a "thing" is not doing graphics, then the StackInterpreter may be
sufficient for many IoT applications. Having a FreeRTOS build target
for the StackInterpreter
might open the opportunity to have our Images running as the *only* application
on a wide variety of embedded systems.  A tight Edit-Compile-Run-Debug
cycle using the TelePharo remote tools might be very compelling versus
the usual Edit-Compile-Download-Boot-Run-BlindGuessDebug cycle.

I'd expect interest that starts with the hobby-maker community,
might later extend into the lucrative industrial control market
in competition with traditional PLCs.


Maybe getting the StackInterpreter running on a new platform
could make a good advanced-student project?


For starters, there seems a simulator here (I haven't used it)
https://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS-simulator-for-Linux.html

which raises one question...
I understand the VM has a problem with some simulators
but is that more a problem for the JIT part of Cog than the StackInterpreter?

cheers -ben