[squeak-dev] re: would it be fun to implement Squeak (and SPOON!) on this hardware?

Doug Jones djsdl at frombob.to
Tue Dec 24 04:05:23 UTC 2013


On 12/23/2013 07:18 PM, Bob Hartwig wrote:
> Why not program the BBB's bare metal?  Too much error-prone hassle to
> initialize everything?
>
>      Bob


Why not indeed?  I like that plan too.  But somebody has to start, and 
then do all that work.

This Micro Python thing is already running.  It's got a working 
codebase, a community building up behind it, and substantial funding.  I 
can think of worse things to bootstrap on top of.

There are motivational things at work here.  Sure, you can work on 
building a minimal Spoon and a minimal VM on a PC-class machine with 
gigs of RAM and millions of lines of OS code underneath it.  But if you 
build it on a really tiny machine, a different kind of pressure builds 
up in your brain.

I like the idea of getting Spoon running on lots of different kinds of 
machines.  But given the number of people willing to work on Spoon so 
far, it seems unproductive to target a bunch of platforms all at once. 
Targeting a minimal hardware platform is a good way of keeping work 
focussed on Craig's original goals for Spoon.  The fact that it has no 
video out is a positive boon.






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