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Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@allObjects
I like the discussion... sort of... ?-)
We all come from different requirement angles. Requirements we came across while trying a thing the best we know and understand - biased or not biased by past experience or immediacy of need. The angles are from usage, implementation options, feasibility, cost, and visionary point of views... Therefore, I don't want to get carried away (anymore) and look at at all the options. So far, I can do with the bare metal API what I want to achieve (in, for example, the memory manager), since it accepts arrays as well. To have some minimal support for int data type was just an idea. I do not have much knowledge what a function definition costs, and therefore - even if an additional layer or incrementally addable extensions may cost more with little extensions and for sure alway more in cycles, overall it may come in more beneficial. Extending incrementally - like Smalltalk could do add methods to given classes - can be done with additional require(s) - especially with the option of the 1v72+ of returning plain objects versus the 1v7 export functions only pattern, a great extension request @Gordon added instantly. I do not know the cost, but for sure he would have objected if too costly. My time with Espruino changed my thinking about resourcefulness, even though I was already always challenging requirements with frugalness.
On a related matter - but not related to passing optionally a length - I have the following question:
Regarding space, what is the price of a variable definition var v = and its meta data for hosting any data type (I mean instance of class) vs. var v = {k:"", v:f} or var v = {k:i, v:f}. with i and f defined (upfront as global) variables referencing an int and function, respectively? (I know that variable name lengths matter, but for the calculation example I need only to know the minimum). - May be I can reliably find out myself with process.memory()... Can I?
I was thinking to uses a new data type which is a reference and retrieves the value from (external) memory on access. I did not wanted to make it an additional data type of the language yet... but was kind of thinking of it... I'm sure you are getting where I'm heading to or for.