Think of it as a runtime + scheduler that you deploy programs to ESP32 devices. It gives you the ability to run multiple programs simultaneously (with isolation) and remote updates. The language compiles to bytecode; the developers have lots of experience writing VMs for constrained devices; see https://www.theregister.com/software/2004/07/27/forgotten-la... for something that predates V8 and Dart.

Tangent: what an appropriate username :)

Thanks! This should be on the homepage IMO instead of the AI slop (or human slop? not sure) that's there now.

This looks super useful actually, I worked in embedded systems in the past and the choice was either go with a microcontroller and have like no features, or do a full Linux and have (much more expensive hardware and) half the team distracted by doing proper linux app development and networking and all that stuff that comes with it. Often we chose plain C microcontroller simply so the team wouldn't go overboard designing a multi-node distributed system when all we needed was control a couple sensors and actuators, but it lacked exactly what you describe, concurrently running multiple things and easy updates. Ok, and printf, which I'm going to blatantly assume is covered here as well.

So yeah this sounds super nice!

You get almost all of that with the more common language options too (MicroPython, NodeMCU/Lua, Espruino/JS). What makes this custom language better?

We looked at these when we started. The problem with them is that they weren't designed with constrained resources in mind and it shows. For example, objects are hash tables and method calls are thus expensive. An obligatory top level execution makes startup slow, ...

If you have a bigger machine you can optimize some of this (V8), but these optimizations typically need memory and/or a JIT. (And Python struggles to optimize even on stronger machines).

By starting from scratch (with what we learned from V8 and Dart) you can design something that feels similar but is much cleaner and faster to run.

I had to upgrade from an M1 Pro with 16 GB to an M4 Pro with 24 GB last year because one of my work projects at the time needed multiple docker instances, and 16 GB wasn't enough. This year 24 GB isn't enough for a few AI models, but there's no budget for an upgrade...

My home "servers" don't do much but 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM is enough them, for now (Linux).

> One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking.

ublock origin lite is on the app stores (both mac and i-devices), and works reasonably well.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

There's a button next to "gyro" labeled "hands." Click on it, and the browser will ask for the camera permission. For me (Chrome, mac), I had to click on the "cal" button next to it the first time to actually switch to the camera.

There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.

I'm sure there are businesses in the UAE, but wondering, why would one keep instances/data on a zone at risk since well over a year now.

Genuinely curious. Aside for high frequency trading where latency is so vital.

The next closest region is Tel-Aviv, I guess it's pretty obvious they won't put their workload here.

And after that it's Mumbai, 2500km away. That will easily double your latency, which is someone that you can feel in usage.

Why wouldn’t they - Israel and UAE have good relations

Israel starts new war every month, you can understand that it is risky to put your data in a data center that could be the target as well.