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Comment by lebuffon | Hacker News Reader

There is a thing called a "tethered" or "umbilical" compiler in the Forth world where the target machine has nothing on it but a small comms program that is controlled by the IDE on the workstation. The IDE includes a way to kick off any piece of code interactively on the target from a command line but there is no actual REPL on the target machine, only the running code. This gives you a big IDE while running on a tiny target and reduces a lot of the crying shown in the cartoon. :-)

Is there something similar for other language environments?

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I know of nothing exactly like that suitable for professional use.

There are ways to tether a microcontroller to a host IDE, like Linx for LabVIEW or the firmata protocol for lots of languages, but those methods don't let you go from running code on the workstation to running code on the target (easily) like I think you're describing. http://firmata.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Mathworks' Matlab and Simulink arduino stuff advertises some capability in that regard but I haven't seen it myself.

IIRC, in the 90's there were several Forth implementations that worked as described and appeared to have been somewhat successful in the embedded market. Those were before my time though.

However, with the amount of RAM/FLASH on modern MCU's you can implement the "compiler" code in Forth. I used a similar scheme for a while during experimental phases, but have moved away as Forth code becomes tedious to modify after you haven't looked at it for a while (e.g. a few weeks). It's just easier to setup OTA firmware updates.

I assume Forth, Inc's stuff works and I assume it's still around, but I've never used it. Forth is lots of fun compared to languages with curly braces so it's too bad it was already on its way out back then.

Modern MCUs have so much RAM and flash you could probably run a whole 1980s style development enviroment on them (think say, Turbo Pascal and a collection of tools) on a console, TUI and all.

Check FlashForth.

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