Caterpillar

One of the use cases that I had in mind for Caterpillar, from early on, is microcontroller firmware. I have worked in this field in the past. I know it can be fiddly. And that your code runs on another device doesn't make it easier. Debuggers can help, but the available options never felt satisfactory. Although maybe that's an issue with working off the beaten path (I used Rust).

I believe that interactive programming could be a huge boon there. And having this in mind has already driven a lot of my thinking about Caterpillar. I've known for a while that it can't end up as some dynamically-typed, high-level thing. I want it to be competitive on devices that run at a few MHz and measure their RAM in kilobytes.

And maybe such a focus would fit my life better than game development does. So much of what I've doing (and dreaming about doing) over the last 10 or so years has been about making physical things. Maybe, instead of supporting firmware development at some point down the line, it would be a good idea to focus on it as the primary use case, starting right now.