MicroPython on M68k Mac

44 zdw 5 7/1/2025, 4:50:19 PM social.afront.org ↗

Comments (5)

fredoralive · 5h ago
Although you could get Python 1.x for 68k Macs already: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython/macpython-older.htm... (the "Even older" bit mentions that 1.5.2 is the last 68k version).

Admittedly, I think this Micropython port is seemingly more targeting a Mac Plus, whilst I suspect the original Mac Python would probably prefer a Quadra (or a PowerMac).

fzzzy · 2h ago
It seems like it might not be that hard to port all the classic mac os code from python 1.5.2 to this.
bb88 · 1h ago
Reminds me of AREXX on the amiga.

REXX was an okay enough language for the time, but the real benefit was not needing to install a compiler -- which required more memory typically than my Amiga had, IIRC.

Meanwhile in college everyone had the 486 chip that could fit in a 386 socket. And I would have bought one, but I was broke. I ended up getting a pentium system with 64MB of ram that ran Linux after my first job.

nxobject · 4h ago
One detail that I'd be interested to see are startup times for the MicroPython environment. Having compiled both Lua and Duktape (an embedded friendly ES7 runtime) for a Macintosh Classic, morally a Plus, I regularly got startup times of up to a minute - I think most of it due to the sheer size of the resulting binaries and standard libraries.
matt_trentini · 58m ago
It's obviously not directly comparable - each port will be different - but startup time is <50ms on an RP2040 (Cortex M0 @133MHz):

https://github.com/micropython/micropython/issues/8420