CircuitPython Goes Turbo With Precompiled Functions

It would not be at all original to declare that Python is the new BASIC. Like BASIC, it has been the first programming language for a whole generation of coders, …. CircuitPython Goes Turbo With Precompiled Functions.

Like BASIC, it has been the first programming language for a whole generation of coders, and its main advantage is that it’s quick and easy to write in. Like BASIC it is an interpreted language, and thus rather slow to execute. Thus while CircuitPython can be very useful for beginners and quick projects, it hits the limitations of the hardware far sooner than it needs to — unless you can pre-compile critical parts of the code, which you now can, thanks to CircuitPython Turbo by [Mikey Sklar] with some help from Anthropic’s Claude LLM.

Now if that sounds a lot like MicroPython’s ‘Viper’ and machine-code compiler, that’s because it is. CircuitPython is a fork of MicroPython with some handy extras on Adafruit boards, but Viper wasn’t one of them until now. Before the Turbo version, CircuitPython only ran in interpreted mode.

Like MicroPython, using CircuitPython Turbo you can flag sections to run as ‘native’, where instructions are compiled but values stay as python objects, which gets you about a 3X speedup.