A C framework for commanding a Pico WH robot over USB, WiFi or BLE with a
small text DSL. No hardware attached yet, so the whole stack runs on the
host against a simulated HAL and is covered by tests.
Two specifications drive the code:
docs/grammar.md the language — one namespace of callables (native,
firmware-resident, and defined over the wire), procedures
with named arguments and defaults, REPEAT, and the rules
that keep it safe on a microcontroller.
docs/flow.md transport, bracket-balance framing, the envelope,
admission, execution, abort and failsafe.
Three properties the design leans on:
- Bodies may only reference callables that already exist, so the call
graph is acyclic by construction, recursion is unrepresentable, and
interpreter depth is checked at definition time rather than discovered
at runtime.
- Nothing blocks. The interpreter is a resumable state machine over an
explicit frame stack, so ABORT is honoured within one tick even in the
middle of a long move, and no program can overflow the MCU stack.
- No queue. One outstanding statement at a time, which keeps abort to a
single unambiguous victim and avoids inventing an answer to "the
running program failed, does the queued one still go?".
Named arguments are resolved to the callee's parameter order at definition
time, so they cost nothing at execution.
rubo_core is target-independent. Porting to the Pico means providing a
non-blocking rubo_transport_t and a rubo_hal_t, and nothing else.
Not built yet: the Pico transport and HAL, the camera DAT/DEND bulk path,
and IF/ELIF, which is reserved in the grammar and lands with the sensors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Hfu1EFVbpee92zvzQunsKb
