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Comment by kbumsik | Hacker News Reader

in embedded systems? If he is talking about using Python in microcontrollers, he does not know what is embedded system.

That's what I was thinking. Nevermind not having things like bit shifting, python can't even run on most micros, because there's no interpreter for them. Micro-python is a thing that exists, but hasn't expanded yet and is probably a long way off.

Honestly, if we're talking about replacing C / C++, it would seem we should be comparing them to Rust or something, not a language whose use model isn't really intended for embedded systems.

I love Python, but this just doesn't seem like the place for it.

And by embedded, he probably meant Raspberry Pis running Debian or something like that.

Python does have bit shifting, for what it's worth.

Hmmmm...I don't remember what I was thinking then. I remember wanting to use something more typically low level, like bit shifting, and it either being way too much hassle or not supported.

Either way, thanks for the correction.

>>> 1 << 4 16

The big problem I've had with Python and bit shifting has just been dealing with negative numbers. Python doesn't have a concept of unsigned ints, or even just 32bit numbers so I end up having to mask everything by 0xFFFFFFFF. Not really a big deal but maybe that's the issue you were running into?

That sounds like it might have been the case. I probably got annoyed and just did it a different way. I'm not really sure though. It's one of those things where it happened awhile ago and made an impression on me, but the details have long since faded, leaving only my opinion :)

it's written just micropython without the dash and is actually quite close to having all python3 syntax implemented

https://github.com/micropython/micropython/

Thanks for the link. Cool to see that they're making progress getting it going on ARM.

Does embedded mean micro-controllers only? I've worked on i7 boxes with 16GB of RAM as "embedded systems". Various customers bought them as such. I guess we've been fooling ourselves and our customers for 10+ years.

Not well defined, but to me embedded just means the device is not a PC or a server.

Could be a microcontroller running bare-metal code or an RTOS with application code. Could be a device like you describe above which, in some cases, resemble a PC with custom I/O requirements.

There's a whole industry built around embedded Linux. Just FYI.

I think there's a lot of room in the embedded system space beyond just a microcontroller, but I would not be comfortable calling something that beefy "embedded."

It's not the size that makes it embedded. It's that it's something that isn't supposed to be a computer - it's supposed to be a nuclear power plant, or a railroad locomotive, or a microwave oven. Size has nothing to do with it.

Depends who you're talking to I guess. I wouldn't call that an embedded system, although it could technically be described as such.

Embedded systems mostly means that the OEM delivers a complete device (hardware and software) where the endcustomer doesn't install anything else. These systems can contain anything from 8bit microcontrollers to i7 processors.

But of course, when many people talk about embedded systems (especially in the context of development) they mean the more constrained devices (microcontrollers without OS or with realtime OS, ...). That's because the others are more PC-like and therefore don't have these special requirements during (software) development.

> That's because the others are more PC-like and therefore don't have these special requirements during (software) development.

Requirements are based on the task, not the hardware. I have written firm real-time software for multi-processor, multi-node Xeon and POWER7 systems.

Just out of interest - what were you doing?

An airborne radar signal processor. We were using telecom-ruggedized IBM blades to run a large-scale (for an airplane) clustered signal processing application. The processing was divided spatially, but needed to be implemented as a grid because the workers had to move in lockstep through the stages of the pipeline.

Is there any custom hardware, built in house, in it? like is it a custom motherboard or do you put in custom PCIe cards that you can't find anywhere else?

If it's a standard Dell server with just some custom software and nothing else special about it, then I have a tough time comprehending why it would be called an embedded system.

If it has like a PCIe card that you can't get anywhere else. that you can only interact with the embedded software you provide. Then maybe I can see it being called an embedded system.

It was about a 2U server size but with additional external packaging, cooling improvements. Some specific hardware cards in in it, wouldn't say "can't get anywhere else" but it was very specific for application domain.

The difference I saw was that a customer was not supposed to interact with it as a general server. They didn't install stuff on it, interacted mainly via external devices and via a web-based config interface.

It was also configured for a specific purpose and had tweaks to kernel scheduling algorithms to provide low latency data processing.

Yes you are right. So just saying "embedded system" is very misleading. He did not mention any of specific field. So I still think he does not know embedded system.

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