Background for folks that are not into MicroPython. This release is so important because MicroPython is almost completely able to replace lower level languages like C for many embedded use cases on the RP20[45]0 and ESP32 and other MCUs at this point, being very solid, fast enough (and thanks to Viper and inline assembly abilities even super fast for critical code paths), portable across MPUs (super important: you can change MCU without rewriting everything), has very good support for SPI and other protocols, and so forth. But... the problem is, before this release MicroPython suffered not the CPU shortage, but RAM shortage: the bytecode needed to stay in memory, and once the program becomes big enough, memory is the bottleneck that limits the project size. To avoid that, you could build your own MicroPython binary with your frozen bytecode inside, in the device flash part, but... if I need to rebuild MicroPython part of the advantage of using it is gone (super fast development cycle is one of those). Well, now, with ROMFS, this is no longer true, MP itself is able to store bytecode in the device flash and execute from there. This makes MP a lot more practical for large embedded projects.
anotherpaul · 1h ago
Thank you for explaining and giving context.
aero-glide2 · 2h ago
Is there still any point in learning Rust then
actionfromafar · 1h ago
You are downvoted, but for some things, no there isn't. MicroPython can be very useful for some use cases and it's safer than C.
thaliaarchi · 3h ago
I find it interesting that MicroPython's `re` module[0] is implemented with a backtracking regular expression engine from re1.5[1], instead of one of the linear-time engines from the same library. (Russ Cox covers the various engines in the excellent blog series[2] which re1 is a companion to.) I figure the choice was made due to binary size or memory constraints, though they're all quite small.
so alternatives to provide additional features have been discussed... Either extending the existing module or swapping to a more feature-rich library. Possibly even doing so for larger micros that can afford the additional flash/memory, though that makes support more challenging.
thaliaarchi · 40m ago
I was talking about the performance, not the feature set. Russ Cox's re1 and the re1.5 fork have several engines for different implementation strategies. re1 was written for primarily pedagogical reasons, so its minimality comes from that.
The engine chosen by MicroPython is vulnerable to catastrophic backtracking and switching to the Pike VM implementation would fix that. Instead of backtracking in the text when the pattern doesn't match, the Pike VM iterates each char in the text only once, visiting the states valid for that position in lock step. Consequently, it allocates a list of “thread”s, proportional in length to the number of states in the pattern (though usually patterns have relatively few states). Many security issues have resulted from regexp denials of service, so this slight memory tradeoff might be worthwhile.
Since recursiveloop.c has been changed by MicroPython, those changes would need to be ported to pike.c. The fixes are small and none of the extra features exploit the backtracking, so this should be easy.
mrheosuper · 1h ago
I want to integrate MP to my project. The core FW is still in c/cpp, but the UI/UX and some logic could be done in Python. But i feel like MP want to be the center of FW.
est · 4h ago
offtopic I am curious anyone tried using micropython to replace CPython o x86 servers?
matt_trentini · 2h ago
Yes, although MicroPython is focused on running on microcontrollers it can be useful if you want to reduce memory consumption, flash space and even startup time on servers.
The challenge is that MicroPython has many fewer standard libraries:
And so many Python libraries targeting CPython won't work out-of-the box and you'll need to modify them or use alternatives that do work on the MicroPython subset.
analog31 · 3h ago
I've not used MicroPython, but its fork, CircuitPython. My impression is that it's essentially a Python that doesn't interact with an operating system. Thus if there's a reason for a server to have an OS and interact with it, the regular Python would be preferable.
I also don't know how much of the more advanced optimizations of Python are built into MicroPython. There's always a dilemma between making it performant, and making it micro.
[0]: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/tree/master/lib/r...
[1]: https://github.com/pfalcon/re1.5/tree/v0.8.2
[2]: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html
https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/library/re.html
so alternatives to provide additional features have been discussed... Either extending the existing module or swapping to a more feature-rich library. Possibly even doing so for larger micros that can afford the additional flash/memory, though that makes support more challenging.
The engine chosen by MicroPython is vulnerable to catastrophic backtracking and switching to the Pike VM implementation would fix that. Instead of backtracking in the text when the pattern doesn't match, the Pike VM iterates each char in the text only once, visiting the states valid for that position in lock step. Consequently, it allocates a list of “thread”s, proportional in length to the number of states in the pattern (though usually patterns have relatively few states). Many security issues have resulted from regexp denials of service, so this slight memory tradeoff might be worthwhile.
Since recursiveloop.c has been changed by MicroPython, those changes would need to be ported to pike.c. The fixes are small and none of the extra features exploit the backtracking, so this should be easy.
The challenge is that MicroPython has many fewer standard libraries:
https://github.com/micropython/micropython/wiki/Standard-Lib...
And so many Python libraries targeting CPython won't work out-of-the box and you'll need to modify them or use alternatives that do work on the MicroPython subset.
I also don't know how much of the more advanced optimizations of Python are built into MicroPython. There's always a dilemma between making it performant, and making it micro.