It’s truly incredible the impact this company has had without yet managing to become a household name. They don’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet, as far as I can ascertain. I had my doubts, especially with esp-idf for the esp32 having a somewhat troublesome start. But these guys have been absolutely crushing it this year.
The S2 series of ESP32 modules have USB OTG support rolling out pretty radidly right now, based on TinyUSB’s stack, and the touch capacitance sensor implementations on those chips is truly a generation ahead of the initial series. It’s as if they totally rethought the ESP32 in the context of how it could be used to enable hobbyists to become makers of consumer-friendly devices with modern, professional interfaces.
Even the documentation for the S2 chips is like nothing I’ve ever seen for a microcontroller —— they describe in incredible detail how you can use their touch sensor support to enable waterproof touch panels, touch screens, proximity sensors, sliders, keypads.
They even get into describing layer-by-layer which materials to use in order to construct an effective, professional touch sensor. That is invaluable information for device makers hoping for a leg up on their competition, and Espressif didn’t really even have an obligation to include this level of information — they know how revolutionary this could be.
I think we’ll start seeing Espressif not only be the company that brings IoT mainstream, but the company that steers the future of IoT in the same sort of way that IBM did with the PC. They’re defining a ton of protocols, services and silicon technologies and I think they’ve already surpassed a critical mass where other companies will have to standardize around Espressif’s implementations if they want to achieve any real success in this market.
Microsoft’s first product ever was a port. MS-DOS was literally just someone else’s product, rebranded. Bill Gates’ wealth was built on the backs of many, many people, many of whom he just flat-out screwed over. Microsoft was anti-competitive almost from the very start, that’s why Gates is wealthy, not because he built himself up from nothing.
It’s hard to imagine this wholly unremarkable speech was posted here to encourage earnest discussion about the defunct TerraMar Project and not to encourage discussion about Ghislaine Maxwell. Hacker News hardly feels like the right platform for either.
I completely disagree with the premise that a high-level language should be able to do substantially more work with the same amount of code as C. That is not the point of a high-level language, not even close. The point of a high-level language is simply to abstract away some of the more difficult problems inherent to programming closer to the metal.
And as far as languages go, JavaScript is not nearly so far removed from raw machine code as most interpreted languages.
100MB of JavaScript code is not “astoundingly huge” at all , considering the bulk of that is tooling. Compared to the tooling for many other commonly used C/C++ development environments, 100MB is pretty modest.
