Ultibo – An embedded or bare metal development environment for Raspberry Pi
In this technical retrospective (2016), @pjmlp shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 47 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 18 comments
Pascal is a neat language. I am generally in agreement with Kernighan's assessment of it (https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html ↗), but most of the problems he lists have since been fixed by many implementations of the language, leaving something quite usable, and a heck of a lot safer than C.
It is unsurprising, in light of this, that the person who submitted this to HN is pjmlp, a well-known fan of Wirth's languages, and a person who notably dislikes C. He's probably also a Unix Hater, although I never asked.
Not that any of this is bad, mind you (I was raised on C/UNIX, and even I'll indulge in some Unix-Hating from time to time (It's probably the Lisp that does it), and whether or not you like the Wirth family, you can't deny it's interesting), but it explains a lot about why this (exceptionally interesting, by the way) project was likely submitted to HN.
I think it's interesting. The fact that it's written in Pascal takes me back to my youth, when Pascal was still commonly taught as an entry-level language in schools.
It's probably not for everyone, and the license terms suit it best for a hobby projects (LGPL or a more permissive license would be better), but it's neat that it exists.
EDIT: I stand corrected. It is released under the LGPL. That is permissive enough for more use cases when static linking is required.
Had to dig around a bit to find out what this is. https://ultibo.org/wiki/Getting_Started ↗
Seems to be a Windows IDE in Free Pascal that renders single self sufficient program images to use on the pi without any linux involved, similar to Arduino.
I would prefer it to be in c and on linux, but nonetheless, interesting.
Considering the link doesn't send me there, but redirects to a showcase, consider me disappointed.
I remember spending a great deal of time playing with the TurboPascal compiler, and the Pi is a nice, simple piece of hardware to build an OS for.
This sort of thing could be great fun.
There is alaso eLua but for other (dumber, smaller) platforms.
http://www.eluaproject.net ↗