4 ms·
I love the idea of bare-metal ports to the Pi. I saw snakeware posted here not too long ago. Are there other examples? ColorForth would be interesting as well
by slobiwan 6y ago
I love the idea of bare-metal ports to the Pi. I saw snakeware posted here not too long ago. Are there other examples? ColorForth would be interesting as well
- johndoe0815 6y agoIn addition to the Interim Lisp system I mentioned in another comment, there are a number of bare-metal applications for the Raspberry on github (mostly ports of games). I especially like this Commodore 64 emulator (also based on circle): https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64 https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64
- guenthert 6y agoCould someone share what one gains with such 'baremetal' ports? I see only the loss of common ground, well tested libraries and functionality. It doesn't take a lot of Linux know-how to boot you favorite interpreter from /etc/rc.local or replacing /sbin/init (losing the libraries again, but at least keeping the kernel with the filesystem, network support and all the hardware drivers).
- johndoe0815 6y agoIn general, lower code complexity results in fewer bugs and security problems, less code implies lower resource usage, so you could run the system with a smaller main memory, a slower CPU or lower power/energy consumption. In addition, if you plan to target real-time applications, setting up Linux to guarantee your real-time constraints is not trivial. All of this is not that relevant for running Smalltalk-80 on the Pi, since Smalltalk was running happily on 16-bit machines with one or a few MBs of RAM. So I guess the ultimate reason for doing this is "it can be done" - for the fun of hacking :-).