Microvium

Recently, I started working on a bytecode compiler and virtual machine which I’ve currently called Microvium.

(For those who have been following me, you’ll know I’ve also been working on a full JavaScript compiler called MetalScript for a while. MetalScript is still in progress and probably will be for some time — it’s not a small undertaking. Microvium is not MetalScript)

Quite simply, the objective of Microvium is to provide a way to run small scripts on microcontrollers, particularly for very low-resource devices (for example, those with less than 2 kB of available RAM).

I chose the name “Microvium” because it sounds similar to “Micro VM” (the original name) but is less generic. In particular, there is already an npm module named microvm.

There are already solutions that do this, so why am I creating a new one?

Microvium will have its own unique approach and tradeoffs which will give it advantages and disadvantages compared with other existing solutions, making it suitable in different scenarios. I’ll be discussing these in more detail in upcoming posts, but briefly, the two main focuses for Microvium are:

1. The ability to run part of my favorite language (JavaScript) on a tiny device. I currently have it running on a 16-bit MCU where the whole firmware and scripts are using 8 kB of ROM and about 500 B of RAM.
2. Leveraging the MetalScript idea of suspending a VM on your desktop computer to have it resume later on the embedded device. The heavy lifting of parsing and importing can be done on the desktop, while the device can just continue with the “easy” stuff.

Early Prototype Released

Last week we released the first working prototype to npm. Check it out on Github:

https://github.com/coder-mike/microvium#microvium-microvm

This hardly counts as a “release”, since really it doesn’t run anything except the “Hello, World!” example, so don’t go download it just yet. Really, it was just a test run of the release process, and to get a sense of what it would look like to use it. The exercise was worthwhile since it resulted in a few changes to Microvium to make it easier to use, and to simplify the concepts.

Subscribe to my blog to get more updates and stay tuned for an actual release, hopefully in the not-to-distant future.