Re: [BLACKBOX] Mobile-device development

From: [at]} <Wojtek>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:42:45 -0500

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Chris:

Is the compiler quite enough for the embedded projects, or do you
also need a runtime system?

My question is entirely practical. Two years ago I designed a single-board
computer pictured on the following web page. (The photo is 2 years old;
I will remove the word "new" from the website....)

               http://www.blackstamp.net/new.htm

A few weeks ago my University decided to use this platform for our
distributed control system. A hardware engineer and a software engineer
are looking into the uCLinux toolchain and kernel for this board.
If you ever saw the Linux "tools" in action, you would probably
agree that the word "awful" is an understatement. Actually, what is
"awful" from our Wirthian perspective, probably seems "awesome" for a
seasoned C programmer.

              http://blackfin.uclinux.org/gf/

Here are the questions:

1. Is there any chance that your Embedded Oberon, or whatever is the name
   of your project, can be ported to uCLinux?

2. Is there any chance it can run as a standalone embedded system
   without the support of the embedded Linux kernel?

3. Is there any chance to see a Blackfin backend for your compiler?

4. Who is going to support either #1, #2, or #3?

I think that trying to answer these question can become an acid test
of your idea. Here is a single-board computer with a very powerful
and modern processor (a joint ADI/Intel chip). It should be possible
to run an Embedded Oberon system on such a device. Is it?

Wojtek

PS: A few days ago I sent a message to this list; I never saw it
in my inbox.


> My initial target is to implement the minimum required to make it
> self-compiling so it can be propagated in the same way as Pascal-P was in
> the 1970's. To Oberon-0 I've added pointers, chars, strings, REPEAT loops,
> Forward procedures, SIZE, ORD and CHR and enhanced the assembly code
> listing.
>
> I've removed nested procedures (not as crucial as they were in Pascal now we
> have Modules). Value parameters may also go once I have IN and OUT
> parameters working in addition to VAR for all data types. I'm currently
> working on EXPORT and IMPORT - there would not be much more required than
> that to enable it to compile itself.
>
> Anyway, we should continue this conversation off-line as it is straying away
> from BlackBox and probably of little interest to others here. I'll send you
> an email with more detail in the next few days.

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Received on Wed Feb 13 2008 - 17:42:45 UTC