Status of Develop.activity?

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On Dec 5, 2007 10:15 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Finally we have the problem of NO systems programming language
>> being supplied. It's less than 9 MB for the whole C development
>> environment, including a decent collection of *-devel packages.
>> You even get a second language thrown in for free, x86 assembly.
>> Pretty much everything that matters is written in C, including
>> the Python interpreter.
> 
> I'd be very interested in hearing details of your 'whole C development
> environment'.  By my casual inspection, 'rpm -qi gcc' says that gcc
> alone is over 10MB, and that *doesn't* include any of the *-devel
> packages needed to make it actually useful.
> 
> I believe there has been some work done on identifying a "lightweight"
> C development infrastructure; your assistance there would be helpful.
>  --scott
> 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the XO a platform for learning, not 
software development? And isn't it supposed to be lightweight and 
child-friendly? I would dearly love to have Ruby in there, and R, and 
SBCL, and Guile, and Maxima, and Perl, because I don't know *any* 
Python. But the philosophy of the machine is that languages other than 
Python and Squeak/Smalltalk are discouraged. I don't mind learning 
Python to be able to program the machine.

Now, if you truly want a lightweight development environment, install 
"gforth". I believe it's under 2 MB, and it's a full ANS
Forth, not the basic low-level Forth that's in the boot firmware. It 
has, like most Forths, an assembler and dis-assembler.

That said, when I get my G1G1, I'm certainly planning to load additional 
software on a Secure Digital card, but that will probably be 
cross-compiled on another system, rather than native-compiled on the XO, 
simply because I've got much bigger workstations to use for compile 
engines.