The ESP32-S3 has 512 KB of SRAM, and the RP2350 has 520 KB of SRAM. The ESP32-S3-WROOM does indeed come in configurations with additional PSRAM, but that would be comparing apples and pears. The WROOM is an entire module complete with program flash, PSRAM, crystal oscillator etc. It comes in a much larger footprint than the actual ESP32-S3, and it is entirely conceivable that one could create a similar module with the same amount of PSRAM using the RP2350.
Furthermore, the added RAM in both cases is indeed PSRAM. That being said, the ESP32-S3 supports octal PSRAM, not just quad PSRAM, which does make a difference for the throughput.
And go cellphone style: Package-on-Package or Multi-Chip Module of some sort.
Wouldn't the massive increase in capabilities from adding 8MB-16MB of closely-integrated, fast RAM far outweigh the modest price increase for many applications that are currently memory-constrained on the Pico?
Note that this was written 2024-08-08. While I haven't kept up to date with exactly what's been happening in rp-rs, I do know that probe-rs has since been updated with support for the RP2350. Other things may be outdated as well.
Which may or may not be fine in a Go binary that runs on a modern desktop CPU, but what if your code is supposed to run on say an ESP32-C3 with a whopping 160 MHz RISC-V core, 400 KB of RAM and maybe 2 MB of XIP flash storage?
You could of course argue that that's why no-std exists in Rust, or that your compiler might optimize out the animated GIF routines, but personally, I'd argue that in this context, it is bloat, that - while it could occasionally be useful - it could just as easily be a third party library.
It’s the same as in C, Rust, or any other programming language I’ve ever used. If you don’t use a library, it doesn’t end up linked in your executable. Don’t want to animate GIFs on your microcontroller, then you don’t write `import “image/gif”` in your source file.
I think the lack of strong standard library actually leads to more bloat in your program in the long run. Bloat is needing to deal with an ecosystem that has 4 competing packages for time, ending up with all 4 installed because other libraries you need didn’t agree, and then you need ancillary compatibility packages for converting between the different time packages.
> It’s the same as in C, Rust, or any other programming language I’ve ever used. If you don’t use a library, it doesn’t end up linked in your executable.
I don't think that's true. If the standard library is pre-compiled, and it doesn't use `-ffunction-sections` etc. then I'm pretty sure you'll just get the whole thing.
There is experimental support for building Rust's standard library from source, but by default it is pre-compiled.
It's hardly the case that a good reason to not have a more complete standard library on the basis of having to do a tiny bit more work in a more special case to get binary sizes down.
Does anyone use the full standard library for embedded targets? I've not seen it done in C, java has a special embedded edition, python has micro-python, rust seems to usually use no-std, but I might be wrong there.
It seems like a bad reason to constrain the regular standard library
The RP2040 has a single QSPI controller channel, but with clever hacks you can multiplex that to boot from SPI and switch over to some other (Q)SPI peripheral, but iirc you can't write directly (can be emulated via MPU+DMA). What's also quite neat is that you can use the external flash cache as 16kiB SRAM tiled repeatedly over a 16MiB memory window. By abusing the MPU you can allow/trap accesses down to 256 byte granularity and implement virtual memory (allow only one alias address at a time, treat the 16kiB SRAM as a direct mapped cache, and demand page from QSPI, other SRAM banks, or whatever you can come up with).
The SNES and the Gamecube did have the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player respectively though, but I'd probably count that as sideward compatibility rather than backward compatibility.
> All of those single celled organisms didn't come from nowhere, overnight. There was, at least at some point, the first single celled organism. Not only the first one, but the first one that was able to reproduce. There could have been millions, billions of single celled organisms incapable of reproduction that died. The odds of just getting one single celled organism, by itself, without the ability to reproduce, is already ludicrous.
The general thinking among researchers is that single-celled organisms were preceded by self-replicating and self-catalyzing molecules, like RNA. Abiogenesis is a fascinating area of research.
> Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human intelligence. Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.
That's only an apt analogy if genetic mutations didn't include any kind of feedback mechanism. Natural selection makes them very different scenarios.
