[gambit-list] Porting to "small" machines -- target requirements?

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Sat Sep 18 09:55:20 EDT 2010


On 2010-09-16, at 10:07 PM, Michael Wirth wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> Has anyone done an estimate (or measurement!) of the resources
> required on the target platform to do a port of Gambit?  For example,
> for a given processor architecture, what are the memory requirements
> to support a port of the interpreter for code, stack space, data RAM,
> etc. Other HW resources and functional support?
> 
> I have in mind the types of processors currently used by "embedded
> systems", which tend to have lots of processor power, but either
> simple and small memories or rather baroque memory architectures
> (e.g., a mixture of ROM, fast and slow RAM, writeable FLASH, etc.) and
> no VM support or rotating storage.
> 
> It would be nice to get some "lessons learned" feedback from Gambit
> porters before charging down a blind alley myself :-)

To my knowledge recent versions of Gambit have been compiled on the following embedded systems:

- Nintendo DS (ARM CPU, 4 MB RAM)
- Linksys WRT54GL (MIPS CPU?, 16 MB RAM)
- iPhone/iTouch (ARM CPU, 128 MB RAM)
- Xilinx Virtex II FPGA (PowerPC CPU, a few MB of RAM)

Search the Gambit mailing list archive for details.

Gambit was designed to be extremely portable.  It has very few library dependencies (libc is enough to have a working system).  In the words of the author of the Linksys port (http://weblambdazero.blogspot.com/2008/08/scheme-termite-erlang-alternative.html):

"On the other hand, a great advantage of Gambit-C over Erlang is that it can translate Scheme applications to plain C, which than can be compiled to standalone executables using gcc. Thanks to this feature I managed to compile a few Gambit examples with OpenWRT-SDK and ran it on my home Linksys WRT54GL router with OpenWRT firmware - the only thing I had to do was to replace gcc command with mipsel-linux-gcc while compiling gsc output files."

If Gambit does not compile on your target platform, then please report this to me or the Gambit mailing list.

Marc




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