[Oberon] Sizes of compilers & etc.

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2023 at 16:14, <peter at easthope.ca> wrote:
>
> Ref.
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc/2023/03/15/msg002546.html
> "modern compilers are big."
>
> My thought was "Not all."
>
> "either try adding more swap, or ..."
>
> Or port an Oberon system to the bare machine?  Haven't replied; for
> now at least.  =8~/

Exactly so.

As I often say, I feel that it would be really good for Oberon, or A2,
or both, to have a native, bare-metal version for the Raspberry Pi. It
used to support Arm and StrongArm systems; the A2 web site used to be
hosted on A2 on a StrongArm machine.

The RasPi is not ideal, I know, because it has some many-megabyte
proprietary RTOS underneath. But I think there would be much
educational value in being able to show students a $5 to $10 computer
with a complete OS, with rudimentary Internet access (over Ethernet at
least), which was small enough for them to read and study in its
entirety.

(The RasPi Zero and Zero W are that cheap. I think the Pi Pico is too
small to run even Oberon. It has 264 kB of RAM and 2MB of Flash, which
is less than a Ceres workstation 30 years ago.)

A 1GB Pi 3 would be a capable computer with A2.

There are no other small FOSS OSes that are _that_ small and simple.

(Plan 9 works but it is pretty weird and arcane. Inferno even more so.
Haiku and AROS don't run on the bare metal of the Pi, and they're
*much* bigger and more complicated.)

-- 
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