I don't think I will ever use Lisp but I love the way this site documents different examples with all kinds of hardware. I wish there were more sites like these for other microcontroller/SoC languages like lua, mPython, Arduino derived boards etc.
It's also sporting a much more advanced ARM core[1], Cortex-M7, compared to most of the other ARM boards which had Cortex-M0(+) cores.
The M7 supports cache unlike the M0(+), and the processor used[2] has 64kB of it, split evenly into instruction and data cache. It also supports branch speculation which the M0(+) does not.
While the Teensy has 4.5x the clock frequency of the Pico 1, the Teensy is 8x faster.
Main outlier is the Pico 2 with a Cortex-M33, though still at a reduced clockspeed compared to the Teensy. From what I can see[3] it does not have cache for its on-board memory, "just" branch speculation like the M7.
If you compare it to the only other board in the table with more than 300 MHz (and the only RISC-V) you can see that Teensy outperforms it by a margin even when the results are scaled by clock speed.
Of course it would only be a complete picture taking power consumption into consideration.
Also the M7 is a superscaler. It's not mentioned often, but if the task allows it, you can use what's essentially 1.5x the execution units of the smaller cores. It's not a complete 2x, but I'm sure it helps.
I understand the appeal from a hobby perspective, but is there any advantageous use cases where it would make sense to choose uLisp over other more common solutions for microcontroller software development?
I think it’s cool, and I’ve played with it a bit, but aside from using it as a fidget spinner to explore lisp, I’m wondering if there are applications for the language that would provide an edge in actual use.
On the Mini text-adventure sample, I wonder if porting Malyon from Emacs' Elisp could be feasible, at least to run v3 Zmachine games, small enough to be fastly interpreted even under a C64.
This example in ANS Forth (restricted) interpreters gave me nightmares because I was
dancing with the stack back and forth. No pun intended.
With Lisp, it's a piece of cake.
You're correct that the ESP32-C3 is based on a RISC-V processor, but it has more in common with the other ESP32 boards than it does with the boards supported by the RISC-V version of uLisp, so it made sense to support it with the ESP version of uLisp.
