Port of Espruino to Pi Zero - native - no Linux

@DrAzzy ... I'm still thinking the notion through. The announcement this week of the Pi Zero has changed the landscape. I had been anticipating C.H.I.P. ($8) and Onion Omega ($19) to have been game changers and didn't see a $5 Pi coming.

Let us take a step back. Up until now, we had low end processors such as the Arduino and ESP8266 and also the dedicated (but pricier) dedicated Espruino boards. I am now going to take the Arduino out of the story since it doesn't have the ooomh to run Espruino.

Now if we take the Pico as the gold standard for a platform for running Espruino ... we end up with a device that runs at 84MHz with 96KByte of RAM. It has no video and no USB output and retails at about $25. If we see value in that device ... what more value would we have in an equivalent device which has 1GHz processor speed, 512MB of RAM and GBytes of SD storage ... for a base price of $5.

If we choose to use the Pi Zero as is, then the question becomes one of "What value is Espruino?". My thinking goes as follows ...

I want to write applications. When I write applications, I have a choice of programming languages each suited to different purposes. If my purpose leads me to JavaScript ... the question becomes "which" JavaScript run-time environment should I choose?

As far as I can see my choices are:

• node.js
  
• Nashorn
  
• pijs.io
  
• others?
  
  

Over the last month, I've been eagerly awaiting my Onion Omega but @tve has been cautioning me that because it runs Linux, I may not be happy with what I find. I have no experience running Linux on small embedded systems so I took his cautions as very worthy of consideration. I have a Pi 2 Model B ... but since that is a quad core monster and also comes in at $35, I put that aside as "not applicable" to our comparisons.

Without having had any experience nor read any empirical evidence, my "gut" (and it is only my gut) says that running an existing JavaScript runtime on the Pi Zero will be more than satisfactory for my personal needs. However, if the "cost" of running Linux interferes with what I or others may want to do ... then we eliminate Linux ... and run Espurino on the metal.... and that brings us to this post and the thought experiment.

I see a flow chart here ...

#1 run JavaScript as-is on Pi Zero on Linux and all is well - stop
#2 run Espruino (JavaScript) on Pi Zero with no Linux and all is well - stop

The question in front of us is one that hobbyists in combined electronics/computing like myself will see revealed over the next 6-12 months.... and that is where do we focus our tinkering? Historically it was Arduino because it was so easy and so cheap. Then came the Pi ... but that was really a computer and for some reason the price north of $20 caused us to pause ... we got all excited again about the ESP8266 ... not necessarily because it just had WiFi ... but because it gave us 80MHz processor and 40K of usable RAM for about $5. Now we have another turn of the crank and we have 1GHz processor with 512MB for $5. GULP!! Orders of magnitude improvement.

I can imagine and understand folks saying ... ahhh ... but what about power consumption ... and other dimensions ... and those are all valid ... no question. But in some dimensions ... those that relate to CPU cycles and available RAM and price ... it seems we have just witnessed a dramatic leap forward that will take quite a while to beat.

The reason I waffle down this path ... which appears unrelated to our Espruino discussions ... is that if (just IFF) my suppositions hold any merit, then all eyes will transition to Pi Zero ... likely away from Arduino and likely away from ESP8266/ESP32 ... for the hobbyist community (which is where I play). And if eyes transition to Pi Zero ... then maybe (just maybe) a first class ridiculously efficient JavaScript engine running natively on the Pi Zero might have some value ... and again ... that assumes the Node.js with all ITS eco-system doesn't already fill that niche on the Pi Zero on Linux today.