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> I do award subjective bonus points to languages which actually have a freestanding runtime, that is, I could actually compile them and run them on a bare chip
by RetroTechie 2y ago
> I do award subjective bonus points to languages which actually have a freestanding runtime, that is, I could actually compile them and run them on a bare chip.
That's what I was getting at with "trivial IO": when you ignore what's needed to get data in/out, and optional parts of a standard library (if included), how big is the remainder, the implementation of the language constructs?
(Potentially) standalone, self-hosting & small is indeed the bonus points I'm looking for. A tiny Basic or Forth running bare metal on a uC could be it. A 'tiny' language implemented using a multi-MB VM is not.
- samatman 2y agoIt seems we're basically in agreement then. I do want to point out that the weight of the Lua 5.4 standalone binary on my machine is 70KiB. Yes, you read that correctly. Lua is truly amazing in terms of the amount of power you get for how little there really is. One of the reasons it's faster than most other VMs with no JIT functionality is because the entire VM fits in a typical L1 cache. My laptop's L1 is 192KiB, meaning it could fit 122KiB of program state in with the VM without breaking a sweat.