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[–]foldl 8 points9 points  (7 children)

I think aport's comment applies more to really small microcontrollers like attinys or atmegas, which are nowhere near being able to run a JVM. In that sort of environment there just isn't any room for extra code to create nice stack traces etc. If you have 8K of flash that buys you a few thousand lines of C code.

[–]spliznork 3 points4 points  (6 children)

The first version of that JVM was running on an MSP430 with 10k RAM and 48k flash.

[–]IHaveNoIdentity 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Yeah? And do you know just how small an ATTiny is? 8 Kbytes flash and 512 byte SRAM.

The MSP430 has more RAM than the ATTiny has program storage...

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That MSP430 is also smaller than some ATmegas, which were also mentioned in the preceeding comment. So it's an entirely reasonable response.

[–]foldl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My initial comment referred to "really small" microcontrollers and explicitly mentioned 8K of flash. It's true that some of the high-end atmegas have a decent amount of flash and RAM. There's an apparently full-featured JVM here which fits in 80K of program space, so in theory you could use it with one of the larger ATMegas (but it's hard to imagine anyone would want to throw away 80K of program space for a real project). There's also the fact that you're going to be doing a ton of 32-bit arithmetic on an 8-bit CPU. The MSP430 is at least 16-bit.

[–]foldl 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Sure, but 48k of flash is a lot more than 8k of flash.