MicroPython's maturity and future

[stijn]

It's been a couple of years since I ran the evaluation of what to choose for our application so I don't remember all reasons, but the main reason was definitely that MicroPython was the only Python 3 implementation which even came close to building for the 'INTime for Windows' platform (an RTOS which can run side-by-side with Windows). For example CPython insists on accessing the registry on startup when built with an MS compiler. That and other nonsense would make the patch to get it working on INTime huge and a complete maintainance nightmare. Other reasons which are all exactly the opposite of what CPython is: not that much source code, understandable enough, bugs gets fixed quickly, not too hard to add another platform. Furthermore we don't have a preference towards raw speed and if there really is a problem with that (didn't occur yet) it can be offloaded to native code. As such the claim that CPython is faster which is like the only real benefit left (and which could be true for certain usecases, but probably not for all of them) becomes irrelevant.

[Roberthh]

@stijn These are understandable and good reasons, indeed.

[fpp]

@Dave & Peter : thank you both for the confirmation(s)!
I suspected as much, actually, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing an easier way to drive an USB-HID client device under Python
Last winter I spent quite some time trying implementing various such HOWTOs on a raspberry Pi W, and failed abysmally (at the system level).
Guess I'll just have to try again...

[pythoncoder]

To be fair to CPython there are advanced use cases where MicroPython is too, er, Micro. See https://github.com/micropython/micropyt ... ifferences. In particular metaclasses and the introspection features of CPython will be missed by programmers with huge brains. Lacking such an organ there are few features of CPython which I miss, but mileage evidently varies.

As an example of the different optimisations compare the pickle module. MicroPython's is seriously minimal. CPython's is written in C so runs very fast. It produces a compact binary file.

They are different tools for different jobs, which both do very well.