On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 09:27 +0900, Joel Rees wrote: > I didn't think your question got properly answered, so I'm going to > add a few comments and a few off-topic links. > > gforth, as I see it, would best be described as a hosted forth. So, > if you want to use it as an embedded system, you'll need to put at > least glib (thus, ulib, as Edward mentioned) underneath it. > > Or, if you have a few megabytes of flash and RAM to keep a full host > OS, you might try a stripped-down Linux or BSD underneath gforth. > (netBSD and openBSD have small footprints, and then there are "Damn > Small Linux" and "Puppy Linux" and similar. If you check around those > communities, they can point you to even smaller unix-ish host OSses.
The "buildroot" environment makes a full-ish Gnu/Linux toolchain and Linux environment on the target embedded machine, including such niceties as a jffs2 filesystem. I have two Gumstix, and the links to the (open source) software are on the Gumstix website. I haven't done much with mine in the past year, but when I did, I was able to even get a full-sized Ruby interpreter into it. You can, if you want, even put the gcc and other Gnu tools *inside* the Gumstix, although it would probably be too slow except for very little programs. If you build enough of the toolchain and "seed" it with a binary of gForth, you should be able to do a "./BUILD-FROM-SCRATCH" on the machine as well. > > I'm not sure what Bernd and David are doing, didn't take the time to > check, but it would be theoretically possible to go the other > direction, and replace the parts of glib that gforth is dependent on > with your own code. I don't think gforth uses all that much of glib, > so it may just be a matter of a few primitive routines. > > Other places you might want to look for more information on using > FORTH as the embedded OS -- forth.org is back up, and has a number of > very small models of the old fig-FORTHs: > > http://forth.org > http://forth.org/fig-forth/contents.html > > The fig-FORTH model listings are partial image-to-pdf conversions, > you'll need to be able to view large graphical PDF files. But, for > all that the pdfs are huge downloads (12M), the actual listings are > on the order of 40 ~ 80 pages of assembly language language, and not > very dense, at that. Definitely possible for a single person to read > and understand within a month or so. I think there are much easier ways to build an embedded Forth from scratch, particularly with the help of a cross-toolchain. Almost any of the Forths that are written in C would be easier to work with than fig-Forth. > > OpenFirmware might be interesting, or might be confusing overkill. > You can search on, say, google, for "openfirmware arm". Mitch Bradley (last time I looked, anyway) was working on the One Laptop Per Child, which uses openFirmware Forth as a "BIOS". I've got two of them. I don't know how much of the kernel is x86 assembler and how much is Forth, but it shouldn't be too difficult to rig one up as a cross-compiler for an ARM chip. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky ruby-perspectives.blogspot.com "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." -- Alfréd Rényi via Paul Erdős --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
