[maemo-developers] programming on the n800 itself

[From: Hendrik Boom]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:48:47 +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> ext Hendrik Boom wrote:
>> Are there any ports available for programming languages so that
>> development can be done on the n800 itself?  Programming in the wild,
>> so to speak, instead of cross-compiling at the desk?
> 
> Well, there are some interpreted languages that are installed by default
> on the device:
> - Busybox:
>    - POSIX shell
>    - Awk
> - Browser:
>    - JavaScript
>    - Flash action script
> 
> All of them offer control structures, variables etc.  For example shell:
> 	x=1; for i in $(seq 20); do x=$(($x+$x)); echo $x; done
> 
> 
>> I have hopes for gcc, or lisp, or something that can handle data
>> structures and static typing.  I've noticed there are a bunch of guile
>> files as part of my n800 system.  Is there also a standalone guile
>> interpreter?

Does anyone know which system component uses guile?

>> 
>> I've seen a report that gcc runs out of memory rather quickly on an
>> n770.  Does the same apply to n800?  And which memory does it run out
>> of?  RAM?  swap?  disk?
> 
> I would assume RAM.  When compiling C++ code, GCC can in some cases take
> even half a gig of RAM.  The development packages can take a bit of disk
> also.

There are 89GB SDHC cards now, so that wouldn't be too bad if swapping is 
cost-effective. But if not, well, I'm not really interested in compile 
times most conveniently measured in megayears.

> 
> 
>> It seems rather ridiculous that a machine with 258MB should have
>> insufficient storage for programming ... back in the 70's we could do
>> some pretty sophisticated stuff on Unix on a 64K PDP-11.  Times sure
>> change, don't they?
> 
> Well, the GCC assembler doesn't require that much RAM, but its set of
> modern high level language abstractions is pretty spartan. ;-)

Well, that 64K Unix system did have a C compiler, which compiled to 
assembler, which was then compiled to .o, and finally statically linked.

It doesn't *have* to take gigabytes.

Mind you, it didn't statically check the types of function arguments.  
They ended up writing lint to do that.

> 
> 
> For example Lua would be pretty small (also interpreted) and should be
> quite easy to build for the target device:
> 	http://www.lua.org/
> 
> Python can be found from the repositories and it has bindings for Gtk,
> SDL etc.

It looks as if python may be the immediately available tool, then.

> 
> 
> 	- Eero