Interactive Programming for Microcontrollers by Offloading Dynamic Incremental Compilation

Interactive execution environments are suitable for trial-and-error basis programming for microcontrollers. However, they are mostly implemented as interpreters to meet microcontrollers' limited memory size and demands for portability. Hence, their execution performance is not sufficiently high. In this paper, we propose offloading dynamic incremental compilation and linking to a host computer connected to a microcontroller. Since the computing resources of the host computer are sufficient to execute incremental dynamic compilation, they are used to enhance the relatively poor computing resources of the microcontroller. To show the feasibility of this idea, we design a small programming language named BlueScript and implement its interactive execution environment. Our experiment reveals that BlueScript executes a program one to two orders of magnitude faster than MicroPython, while its interactivity is comparable to that of MicroPython despite using dynamic incremental compilation.