[Oberon] Sizes of compilers & etc.

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2023 at 17:16, Peter Matthias <PeterMatthias at web.de> wrote:
>
> I think you haven't bought Raspberries for a while ;-)

I have a 3, 3+, 4 and 400. Last one bought a year ago, post-COVID.

I know the faster ones are currently in short supply but the
post-COVID chip shortages are going away, and there will be new
versions coming, of this I am very confident.

Secondly, and I submit that this is very important, the 3 models are
too slow for desktop use with Linux, really, and there are a lot on
the 2nd hand market.

> There are versions with 8MB Flash. As the Pico can run code from Flash,
> I think it would be possible, but too limited.

It's also possible to upgrade the RAM, as I wrote here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/06/pi_pico_transputer_code/

Look for "underpants" :-D

>  Also for ARM, there are 3
> different instruction sets. Thumb-2, ARM32 and ARM64. Only ARM32 has
> open source Oberon compilers.

It is an issue but for now I submit that Arm32 would be enough. At
present the Arm64 chips out there will still run Arm32 code. It is
planned to go away but it hasn't yet.

> With Oberon-V, I am doing something very similar for RISC-V embedded
> controllers. See http://oberon.wikidot.com/project-oberon-v . FreeRTOS
> should be allowed to be used at least in cooperative multitasking mode.
> This simplifies loading a lot. Size of Bootloader written in C for
> FreeRTOS on RISC-V is over 200k. Size of Bootloader for Linux written in
> Oberon is 2.7k...

That is impressive, but RISC-V is still not that common out there, and
the performance is currently very poor. That will change, but for now
they are not competitive.

There are other readily-available tiny computers cheaper and more
available than Pis, but they're often very very low end, e.g.

http://www.lilygo.cn/prod_view.aspx?TypeId=50033&Id=1083

This has SD, dual PS/2, and VGA, and it sells for $12.

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