MicroLisp: Lisp For Microcontrollers Now Has Lisp-Based ARM Assembler

In a way it feels somewhat silly to market a version of Lisp as targeting resource-constrained platforms, considering the systems it ran on back in the 1960s, but as time goes on, what would have given 1970s Big Iron a run for its money is now a sub-$5 microcontroller that you can run uLisp (MicroLisp) on. This particular project now even has an ARM assembler that is written in Lisp whose source code (GitHub) fits on a mere two A4-sized pages.

ULisp currently supports five platforms, being AVR-nano (ATmega328 and similar low-cost AVRs), AVR, ARM, ESP (8266 and 32), as well as RISC-V. The purpose of this assembler is to execute native ARM instructions when running on an ARM board, since uLisp itself runs a Lisp interpreter on the platform. When executed natively like this, a considerable speed-up of the task can be expected, as illustrated by a number of ARM assembler examples in the documentation.

Running a Fibonacci sequence that takes 24.6 seconds with the Lisp version on an Adafruit Metro M4 is reduced to a mere 61 ms when ARM assembly is used instead. This shouldn’t be too shocking, since this assembler essentially bypasses the Lisp runtime, coming closer to what would be the performance of firmware written in e.g. C. However, it also demonstrates that with this ARM assembler it is possible to have your Lisp and still get native performance when you want it, all using Lisp code.

12 thoughts on “MicroLisp: Lisp For Microcontrollers Now Has Lisp-Based ARM Assembler

  1. ” This particular project now even has an ARM assembler that is written in Lisp whose source code (GitHub) fits on a mere two A4-sized pages.”

    Ah, the good old days when big things came in small packages. Now it’s small amounts in big packages.

    1. Everything in LISP is a list. Want to change something? Just make a copy of its list with your changes.

      Friend of mine used to do his prototype software in XLisp. He said that besides being faster to write prototypes in, the prototypes also ran faster than production code, but that was balanced by them also doing more things.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.