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MicroPython on M68k Mac

50 points

by zdw

14 hours ago

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| 3 comments

| social.afront.org

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fredoralive

10 hours ago

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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).

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fzzzy

8 hours ago

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It seems like it might not be that hard to port all the classic mac os code from python 1.5.2 to this.

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nxobject

9 hours ago

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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.

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matt_trentini

6 hours ago

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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

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nxobject

1 hour ago

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That's a useful comparison since it gives some insight to some important differences: part of the difference might be an order of magnitude increase in clock speed (say from 15 MHz to 133+ MHz); another might be an increase in I/O speed. A final one might be memory pressure - classic Mac OS applications conservatively specified memory to reserve in advance since they shared the same memory space, and a lot of purging/reloading of nonessential relocatable resources might be happening.

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bb88

7 hours ago

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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.