Better embedded system support

[marcnicholas]

I'd love to see better support for embedded/resource constrained systems in terms of a minimal core, dealing with the garbage leave in NPMs (I removed a 20MB profile trace from a popular NPM the other day), and paying attention to those of us trying to run node^d^d^d^d io.js on systems with as little as 64MB of RAM and 400Mhz MIPS CPUs (think Arduino Yun).

[bnoordhuis]

I'm not sure if there is anything actionable here. Patches that reduce memory consumption without reducing performance are always welcome, of course, but after that it becomes a fine line.

In many places, space is traded for performance, and that is normally preferable because memory is more abundant than CPU time. I imagine that something like a low-memory mode flag would be acceptable iff it doesn't add a lot of additional complexity. Pull requests are welcome!

[rektide]

http://runtimejs.org/ comes to mind. I'd love to see io.js take it and run with it.

At present, the runtime.js crew have the rather goofy target of only x86 (rightfully pleading they are resource constrained: runtimejs/runtime#27). Unikernel is cool and all, but in terms of people that need bare-metal support, it's definitely MIPS/ARM denizens that have the biggest burningest need. (Maybe projects such as https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT can turn that around some?)

This thread has some details on what needs to go into an platform impl; perhaps a useful reference for anyone interested in a new target for node.

[marcnicholas]

@bnoordhuis Yes, I was thinking something like a "lowmem" flag.

@rektide I wasn't asking to supplant the OS, although runtime.js is interesting....just provide better hooks for running on smaller footprints :)

[Fishrock123]

see also: duktape