Programming paper: Virtual machines (VMs) are highly beneficial for microcontroller development. In particular, interactive programming environments greatly facilitate iterative development processes, and higher execution speeds expand the range of applications that can be developed. However, due to their limited m...

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Researchers from the University of Tokyo present BlueScript, a disaggregated virtual machine architecture for memory-constrained microcontrollers. The approach offloads most VM components to a host machine, leveraging its abundant memory and processing power while maintaining execution on the microcontroller. A shadow machine data structure on the host mirrors the microcontroller's execution state to minimize communication overhead. Experiments show the offloaded incremental compiler achieves faster execution than MicroPython and Espruino while maintaining comparable interactivity, demonstrating that disaggregation can provide rich features without sacrificing performance on resource-limited devices.

BlueScript: A Disaggregated Virtual Machine for Microcontrollers