Wren status and porting to microcontrollers possible?

[george crombie]

Hello. I see that posts here are several years old. Is Wren still under development?

I was wondering if anyone had ported wren to run bare metal on a modern microcontroller, such as a raspberry pi pico or any flavor of the esp32? These have tons of RAM, large external flash used for code and files, and in general are equal to desktops of an earlier era. they should be plenty fast enough for wren to really fly!

I'm glad to help with testing and debugging and possibly with coding, though I am not a coding wizard.

thanks.

Dr. C

[Eric Seidel]

The last commit to wren was 2 years ago:

https://github.com/wren-lang/wren

About 3 years back I tried to port it to rust, but didn't quite finish.

https://github.com/RubberDuckEng/safe_wren

https://github.com/domeengine/dome appears to still be active.  I think folks are still using it, just haven't seen much activity on this list.

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[george crombie]

I am most interested in porting the wren-cli code to arduino platform. The arduino can support filesystems, so source code as well as compiled binaries can reside there. The newer chips have abundant RAM (400k in some cases), more than was needed to run the Turbo Pascal system back in the 1980s.

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[george crombie]

One area of concern for me is the types in wren. For a controller system, types like unsigned int, unsigned char, and possibly 64 bit int and 64 bit float, might be needed. Rust seems to have lots of types. Did you use anything fancy in your port? How did it impact the compiler/interpreter? (I know folks get frustrated with lua limit to either float or int values for numbers for example.)

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. I found the webpage for the wren author, have not reached out to him yet. He does have a free book on his site which might be instructive.

DrC 

[Brian Slesinsky]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 8:41 AM george crombie <drgeoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

One area of concern for me is the types in wren.

I think you might be looking for a different language.

Like many scripting languages, Wren doesn't have a static type system. It's something many people want these days (including me) but that would be a different language.

(For much more popular languages, it's worth retrofitting, but not for an obscure language like Wren. Not much Wren code exists.)