They said the links provided by their parent were better than 'this' page, which presumably refers to the submission, not (some undisclosed alternate ad-ridden frontend to) HN.
Except Chrome, other Chromium browsers have effective filters/blockers for ads and annoyances. I find Brave's GUI to be very intuitive and fast, and one can disable its crypto features and other nonsense.
But in past year, I've noticed Brave is broken on popular sites like Reddit, so I have recently switched ditches it and switched over to Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is fast and nice, with a clean interface, though it is slower in its Windows variant as it has lots of features compared to other Chromium browsers.
I have Firefox as secondary browser, I especially like its extensions support: uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are great at adblocking and annoyances filtering. But Firefox is a bit cumbersome in its UI, and I felt it is slower especially in its Windows variant
Firefox had some memory leakage problem, so I had avoided it for years, but it's become better in its latest versions, I don't seem to encounter the memory leakage issue anymore.
I steer clear of Chrome (disabled it on all my phones and tablets) due to Google's penchant for ads-based revenue, though its corporate avatar as Microsoft Edge is quite efficient and effective as a daily workhorse.
Wow, these preassembled ESP32 plus touchscreen boards are extremely cheap, and there are tons of them in all kinds of different form factors on Amazon. I didn't realize this kind of thing was so plentiful, this seems like a great way to bootstrap many kinds of electronics/IoT projects
Here’s a list of just a few. They’re insanely popular not only because they’re just good to use, but also because they’re one of the cheaper FCC approved modules you can buy, which takes a lot of the pain out of bringing a product to market.
So, am I right in assuming that ESP32, being simple and slow, isn't going to have cache lines or anything, and would just need 1-2 cycles to access its RAM? In which case a pointer-chasing dynamic language like python wouldn't have all of the typical performance penalties from constant cache misses?
EDIT: upon further research, I think the above assumptions are more or less all wrong, starting with the "simple" part. To start with, they're Harvard-architecture-ish with separate memory pathways - and caches - for data and instructions, so off the bat they have more heterogeneity than your modern general purpose CPUs. Also there seems to be a very wide variety of memory mappings, buses, and caching systems within ESP32 "family". [1]
Micro python is the last hope for Python.
Python simplicity got destroyed by a bunch of new wave of programmers who packed a lot of new useless features into it in the past 10 yrars. Now it's NOT easy and small language as it used to be...
Feature creep is an awful side effect.
I would love to have language having just few add-ons per decade so I can grasp it all
I know Python since version 1.6, it was never simple, people that don't read the reference manuals are the ones that think that is a BASIC like language in complexity, when in reality it has always been more into Common Lisp / C++ kind of sense.
I still do not understand how Python won out over lua. Which is imho the superior scripting language just constrained by a smaller userbase.
Lua is like embeddable in what 500 KiB. While python takes its about 200 to 300 MiB
I think Lua is an interesting language and I really like it having TCO, so that I can properly write recursive logic like in a Scheme. However, I am somewhat worried about data structures. When I read about Lua, it always seems quite thin on that front. On the other hand I just looked up Lua data structures and found a book called "Programming in Lua" and the first page I read was about "tables", which I assume to be something like dictionaries in Python, and it says that arrays and others are implemented on top of "tables". What about immutable data structures? Are there libraries for purely functional data structures? How complete are they?
These things I don't usually look up for Python, because Python is clearly not a very functional language and doesn't have the immutable data structures at all, and doesn't even feature TCO, so basically Python is mostly lost, when it comes to doing FP, and I accept, that it is not really that kind of language. I only try to use FP knowledge to avoid common pitfalls, when coding in Python. But from Lua I would expect better.
I don't think being 1-indexed is what made the reason.
While it was already in widespread use, Python really took off in the scientific/research community, thanks first to numpy and then to all the other libraries built on top of it up to the current crop of ML/AI libraries.
Those people used to write a lot code in Fortran, Matlab and R (depending on their research area) which are all 1-indexed.
Also Lua is kind of frozen in version 5.1, if one cares about performace, while even if CPython only recently got JIT love, there are several other alternatives.
This is kind of a strange take to me given that Python is quickly becoming the default for many projects that 1) are not indexing for speed/efficiency and 2) is not on the web (and sometimes this only applies for frontend). There are plenty of cases where that statement is incorrect but I think you get my point.
I think I read a title on HN that was literally titled “Why Python Won” in late 2025.
> Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.
> The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.
OOP is from the 1960s (Simula 67 is generally recognized as the first OOP language.) Probably not actually the last new significant thing invented in programming, though.
All of them. Starting with syntax changes or type hints.... (Python should be always and only be duck typed forever as designed by God itself (it's creator).
No, mypy existed before the type hints spec, and was created by Jukka Lehtosalo; Guido did, once he encountered it, work to make sure mypy could work with Python rather than being a separate, python-like language, and the type hints spec was a big part of that.
Yeah, async Python is one of the top 2 things that I just get pissed off when I think about it too much. Along with Lin-Manuel Miranda not being involved with Moana 2.
First product is called SecureCoop, that either opens the coop door or monitors another coop opener, then sends phone notifications if there are issues. Door didn't open on time, door is stuck, etc.
Next product will be battery security cameras trained on predator models (raccoon, fox, snake). Then the next one will be an electric fence monitor. All solar powered.
Basically going for back yard security for small hobby farms.
Biggest hurdle has been that I only knew 5% of what I needed to know to do this. Haha. Many mistakes. But now am close to visiting the FCC lab for SDoC verification, and then I can legally sell.
Wish I knew... I'm half way towards looking for companies who make white label android devices for a project of mine... I originally wanted to go stm32, but as soon as you add a touchscreen and want a responsive gui, my only options seemed like "smart displays" with pre-rendered ui graphics, or a full blown arm device. /shrug
Is it possible though? I have never seen an LVGL demo (just plain C) able to present a demo or animation that is as "smooth" as a MS-DOS game on say a 486. Not that the 486 was butter smooth but it's not quite there. Maybe its the interface for the screen?
But Motorola 68k in say... the Amiga (I don't know Apollo) would have additional chips for sprites and blitting, right? And the ESP - despite being extremely fast, doesn't have that extra support. So you need CPU... + tricks, DMA, triple buffering etc
It's a mixed bag, as it's still not stable (esp as very recently declarative support was added in what was likely a mostly-rewrite). But when it works, it works great (I've only tried on Linux and Android).
Neat. I'm skimming the documentation now and it looks like something worth keeping an eye on.
I have so many long-running scripts that I sometimes set up with TUIs or quick PyQt/PySide GUIs but the GUIs always seem overkill and the TUIs always leave me lacking. flet looks like a good in-between of the two.
I'd say it definitely makes building GUIs more simple and intuitive than the Qt and Tk frameworks at least. And very important for me, it's fully cross-platform (for the most popular platforms anyway). I must admit that the imperative style does start to become painful as complexity increases, which led to me dropping it for a while, and so the declarative update is welcome even though it takes some time for me to mentally grep.
Some I know use it in production for iot in remote factories where internet isn't reliable.
If anything needs to be fixed, anyone with a computer can connect on the USB port and push new pythons files, without the need of an up to date dev environment.
Usually performance isn't that important as those devices handle a few events per second.
Interesting. Would want to see this going on actual Android. Especially since I have a few Python GUI projects going which I intend to use on Android (but currently using flet).
It’s LVGL based, if the GUI and widgets are what you wanted you could use that on Android, although if you have access to native Android this actually doesn’t seem like the best approach to me.
The primary goal I've been seeking for a while now (and which so far only flet has reasonably fulfilled) is the ability to dynamically create GUIs. Like I created a REPL app which works similar to the regular Python REPL, but also if the code entered at the prompt returns a control/component, it shows that control with full functionality. No need to compile anything, esp on another device. And it's a standalone app, not a frontend to a server or even a web view.
I couldn't quickly find a comparison table or similar, to see what parts of Python are not supported by MicroPython. So I asked an LLM and it listed quite a substantial amount of modules of the standard library, that are a shame not to have. No logging module? No multiprocessing? No json, no xml? And the list goes on, including many very useful modules. One can probably somehow get by, installing third party libraries, but then what is the point of being MicroPython, if you need to install tons of libraries to do basic things like reading a JSON file? And as I am currently working on a tkinter application, tkinter being on the list also makes me think: "What a pity, cannot port that to MicroPython."
This is just my first superficial look at it and it is also based on LLM info, which doesn't have to be correct, but if it is correct, then it feels a little disappointing.
Perhaps for more serious app development, it would be good to have real Python and interface with MicroPython for the hardware controlling stuff.
Specifically: JSON is built-in, logging is available. There's no multiprocessing (it is designed for a micro, after-all - and note that thread is available on some ports), no built-in XML lib.
Be sure to check micropython-lib, the MicroPython Awesome List and mim for others.
MicroPython is primarily for embedddd devices with on the order of 1 MB of RAM and FLASH. And applications which makes sense with such constraints. If you have hundreds of MB of RAM, better to just use CPython.
Really cool. How can this be fast? I'd have thought that Python (even MicroPython) would just be unsuitable for certain things like the graphics and animations, at the very least.
I'd use it. I'd be curious to see how close to daily driving it is for stuff like calls, SMS, and email. Something not driven by a giant data mining company would be splendid.
While cool, it certainly won't be delivering Android-like performance, due to the lack of JIT and AOT compiler, coupled with PGO metadata, shared via the PlayStore across devices.
I don't understand, unless I'm misreading this OS has no memory protection. In other words: it can't run applications! And this is not fixable! You can never risk executing untrusted or semi-untrusted code with permissions on something like this.
I've always thought that it would be quite simple to pull "an android" but based on wasm (even perhaps using wasm-in-kernel execution). Quite simple, that is, compared to what Android achieved with Java. But this, this just can't work.
But I don't want an "Android-like user experience", I want something that works and doesn't make me want to pull my hair out and fly to Silicon Valley and punch someone in the face.
I really wish people would stop trying to innovate with user interfaces. In a comment below you criticize this UI because it doesn't have delimited interface elements. I agree that non-delimited user interface is really bad, but I attribute that mostly to Microsoft's flat design innovation, which I didn't like at the time, and I still wish I hadn't had so much influence.
As for invisible scroll bars, again we agree. But I think that was Apple. I'm sure somebody will correct me if it wasn't.
That "Android-like" is based on LVGL which is a brilliant GUI framework for ESP32 (not invented for this project) when you consider the low capacities of the hardware and how efficiently it pulls the animations.
If Android had such GUI, it would be a heck lot faster and drink less energy.
It's FOSS, so you can use it primarily for output with real switches and knobs for input. But then just using plain LVGL would probably be more practical.
I mean I kind of get your frustration, but I don't think innovating the user interface is not really the goal of this project, the opposite actually, it's moreso trying to provide a well-known user interface to devices where that was previously hard, so the goal is to be similar.
I would like to see some fresh ideas in UI though, everything is the same nowadays... :(
https://micropythonos.com/
https://github.com/MicroPythonOS/MicroPythonOS
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/9GGXNF-micropythonos-...