micropython for Linux i386, statically linked

This blog post is to announce statically linked binaries for Linux i386 of MicroPython.

MicroPython (Python for microcontrollers) is an open source reimplementation (see sources on GitHub) of the Python 3.4 language for microcontrollers with very little RAM (as low as 60 kB). The CPython interpreter is not used at all, MicroPython has a completely separate implementation in C, supporting the full Python 3.4 language syntax, but with a much smaller standard library (i.e. much fewer modules and classes, and existing classes have fewer methods). Unicode strings (i.e. the str class) are supported though.

MicroPython can be cross-compiled to many different platforms, including multiple microcontrollers (including the ESP8266 ($5) and the pyboard ($40)) and to Unix systems (including Linux). The micropython binary seems to be 17.56 times smaller than the python binary for Linux i386 (both binaries were statically linked against uClibc using https://github.com/pts/pts-clang-xstatic/blob/master/README.pts-xstatic.txt, and optionally compressed with UPX). The detailed file sizes are:

• python2.7 (from StaticPython, CPython 2.7): 6053147 bytes
• python2.7.upx: 3381556 bytes
• micropython (1.6): 344788 bytes
• micropython.upx (1.6): 161568 bytes

The script for recompiling MicroPython for Linux i386, statically linked is also open source.

Please note that neither StaticPython nor MicroPython open any external files (such as .so or .py or .zip) when starting up, all the Python interpreter and the Python standard library (and the libc as well) are statically linked in to the binary executable.