- Use the power of a full desktop system (e.g. Linux, Emacs, Clojure, etc) to play with some SPI/I2C peripherals
- Compile a very limited subset of Clojure/Lisp to Forth for flashing into a microcontroller
Essentially, I want to take the "tethered" Forth environment (i.e. a full blown interactive development environment talking directly to an MCU), but instead of Forth (Gforth, etc) on the desktop I want to use Clojure/Lisp (basically a language with very rich desktop support).
#1 is pretty easy. I can pick a popular Forth like Mecrisp (which runs on lots of MCUs) and talk to it's Forth interpreter from the Clojure REPL.
#2 is harder, but necessary if I don't want to use #1 just for prototyping.
But why not just use a terminal and Mecrisp (for #1)?
Each Cortex M arm chip comes with a ton of definitions (registers, bit names, etc) that I don't want loaded onto the chip. Also, every little "helper" function I write (to enrich the Forth REPL) takes space on the MCU
Tethered Forths don't have this problem (as you leverage the desktop Forth to handle such things).
But, while Gforth is very nice, it still isn't as "rich" as I want regarding integration into Linux/Emacs (i.e. not enough batteries included).
