Minimal text editor inside the Lua REPL

vidak

akkartik lovely. Perhaps I should take a tour through lua…

Quite regretting limiting this forum to the language BASIC.

akkartik

vidak Happy to provide a tour! Let me know. As much or as little time as you need. It’s nothing great, but that means it’s also pretty easy to learn. The genius of it for me is how little code it takes and how fast it runs. In my experience languages that take little code are slow and fast languages require lots of code..

akkartik

I just found a good looking tutorial: https://diminiminim.github.io/love-cookbook

vidak

akkartik I read through the Lua Basics part of the book this morning.

Love the syntax–how about a TinyLua?

akkartik

Lua is pretty tiny already! I’d ask what problem you’re trying to solve. I have a low opinion of my own language design skills. I’d rather just use what the geniuses from PUC Rio create.

vidak

akkartik perhaps something adapted to the concepts of computer minimalism / minimalist computing!

i really like how you can fit Tiny BASIC into 4K or 8K of RAM–could something similar be done with Lua? I think so!

akkartik

Ok that’s a concrete question. Thank you! I’ll think about it.

akkartik

@vidak Which version of Tiny BASIC fits in 4-8KB? I just noticed that the binary size of the POSIX version is 135KB.

vidak

i think it might be your compile-time options – this Tiny BASIC i am using will fit on an ATmega328P with 300 bytes still left for program text…

akkartik

So to clarify, you’re able to compile a C program down to a few KB using the ATmega compiler toolchain? That’s awesome. I always assumed I need to program in Assembly to create binaries that small.

vidak

akkartik

much of what you can turn off or on for compilation in the arduino studio is defined here:

https://github.com/slviajero/tinybasic/blob/main/Basic2/IoTBasic/hardware.h

akkartik

This seems like another promising option. A Scheme implementation in 400 lines of C which includes continuations so people can invent new control structures.

vidak

i know this sounds like a complete pipe dream, but what about a text editor built around or top of of a VM? the idea would be to send messages or signals to the virtual machine to edit the text.

i am not sure what utility this would have, but it seems like an interesting thought nonetheless.

akkartik

Yeah, this pipe dream is very much what I’m interested in. I’m not opinionated about the language syntax, but Mu was trying to do this.

One challenge in coming up with a portable VM is the wide variety of I/O capabilities. Uxn has one approach to this challenge and it may well be the best.